The Journal of JournalThe of History San Diego
Volume 61 Spring 2015 Number 2 • The Journal of San Diego History Publication of The Journal of San Diego History is underwritten by major grants from the Robert D. L. Gardiner Foundation and the Quest for Truth Foundation, established by the late James G. Scripps. Additional support is provided by “The Journal of San Diego History Fund” of the San Diego Foundation and private donors.
Founded in 1928 as the San Diego Historical Society, today’s San Diego History Center is one of the largest and oldest historical organizations on the West Coast. It houses vast regionally significant collections of objects, photographs, documents, films, oral histories, historic clothing, paintings, and other works of art. The San Diego History Center operates two major facilities in national historic landmark districts: The Research Library and History Museum in Balboa Park and the Serra Museum in Presidio Park. The San Diego History Center presents dynamic changing exhibitions that tell the diverse stories of San Diego’s past, present, and future, and it provides educational programs for K-12 schoolchildren as well as adults and families. www.sandiegohistory.org
Front Cover: Colorized postcards from the 1915 Panama-California Exhibition. (Clockwise) California Tower, Botanical Building, Cabrillo Bridge, and Commerce and Industries Building.
Back Cover: USO Headquarters at Horton Plaza, World War II, supported by the Wax Family of San Diego.
Design and Layout: Allen Wynar
Printing: Crest Offset Printing
Editorial Assistants: Travis Degheri Cynthia van Stralen Joey Seymour
Articles appearing in The Journal of San Diego History are abstracted and indexed in Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life.
The paper in the publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Science-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. The Journal of San Diego History
IRIS H. W. ENGSTRAND MOLLY McCLAIN Editors
THEODORE STRATHMAN DAVID MILLER Review Editors
Published since 1955 by the SAN DIEGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY 1649 El Prado, Balboa Park, San Diego, California 92101 ISSN 0022-4383 The Journal of San Diego History
VOLUME 61 SPRING 2015 NUMBER 2
Editorial Consultants Published quarterly by the San Diego History Center at 1649 El Prado, Balboa MATTHEW BOKOVOY Park, San Diego, California 92101. University of Nebraska Press A $60.00 annual membership in the WILLIAM DEVERELL San Diego History Center includes University of Southern California; subscription to The Journal of San Director, Huntington-USC Institute Diego History and the SDHC Times. of California and the West All back issues are accessible at www. VICTOR GERACI sandiegohistory.org. University of California, Berkeley Articles and book reviews for publication consideration, as well as DONALD H. HARRISON editorial correspondence, should be Publisher, San Diego Jewish World addressed to Editors, The Journal of San J. MICHAEL KELLY Diego History, Department of History, Committee of 100 Balboa Park University of San Diego, 5998 Alcalá Park, San Diego, CA 92110 ROGER W. LOTCHIN University of North Carolina Chapel Hill All article submissons should be computer generated, double-spaced JOHN PUTMAN with endnotes, and follow the Chicago San Diego State University Manual of Style. Authors should ANDREW ROLLE submit an electronic copy in Microsoft The Huntington Library Word. Photographs must be submitted separately at 300ppi. ROGER SHOWLEY The San Diego Union-Tribune The San Diego History Center assumes no responsibility for the statements or ABE SHRAGGE opinions of the authors or reviewers. Independent Historian ©2015 by the San Diego History Center RAYMOND STARR ISSN 0022-4383 San Diego State University, emeritus Periodicals postage paid at San Diego, CA Publication No. 331-870 PHOEBE S. K. YOUNG (619) 232-6203 University of Colorado at Boulder www.sandiegohistory.org
Note: For a change of address, please call (619) 232-6203 ext. 102 or email [email protected]
ii CONTENTS
VOLUME 61 SPRING 2015 NUMBER 2
ARTICLES
San Diego Invites The World: The 1915 Exposition A Pictorial Essay Iris Engstrand and Matthew Schiff 337 The Wax and Addleson Families: Military Service Abroad and on the Homefront Donald H. Harrison 351 On the Cusp of an American Civil Rights Revolution: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Final Visit and Address to San Diego in 1965 Seth Mallios and Breanna Campbell 375 EXHIBIT REVIEWS Masterworks: Art of the 1915 Exposition Molly McClain
San Diego Invites the World Jonathan Bechtol Coast to Cactus in Southern California Adrienne McGraw 411 BOOK REVIEWS 425
iii Speakers for the opening banquet at the Panama-California Exposition held at the Cafe Cristobal, January 1, 1915. San Diego Invites the World: The 1915 Exposition
A Pictorial Essay
Iris Engstrand and Matthew Schiff
The first substantial groups of people traveled to California from the East Coast during the Gold Rush in 1848-49. They soon found that trains were confined to east of the Mississippi and slow-moving ships carried passengers and cargo around Cape Horn. The first railroad to cross overland and connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans was opened in 1855 across the Isthmus of Panama, then a part of Colombia. With the completion of the first U.S. transcontinental railroad in 1869 followed by the Santa Fe railroad in 1885, thousands of people were able to travel to California more easily, leading to a real estate boom in the 1880s. San Diego planned a city park of 1,400 acres on a central mesa. Unfortunately for San Diego, the Panic of 1893 led to a quick decline in population and properties were left vacant. With a gradual economic recovery during the early 1900s, San Diego evolved into a small city with big ambitions. Residents believed their port and city could become an important base for the US Navy, especially after the visit of Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet in 1908. An initial attempt by France to build a sea-level canal across Panama in the 1880s failed, but only after considerable excavation was carried out. This effort was useful to the United States, which completed the present Panama Canal in
Iris Engstrand is Professor of History at the University of San Diego and co-editor of The Journal of San Diego History. Matthew Schiff is Marketing Director at the San Diego History Center and a writer of San Diego history. They are co-curators of the current exhibit San Diego Invites the World featuring the 1915 Panama-California Exposition.
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1913 and officially opened it in 1914. Along the way, the Republic of Panama was created through its separation from Colombia in 1903 after a US backed revolt left United States in control of the Canal project area. As early as 1909, San Diego booster D. C. Collier began discussing San Diego as the first port of call for ships passing through the Canal. Promotions talked about the “Kiss of the Oceans” and businessmen supported the idea of dredging San Diego harbor to accommodate larger commercial vessels as well as naval ships. By 1910, other city boosters such as John Spreckels, G. Aubrey Davidson, and George Marston began promoting the idea of a celebration honoring the completion of the Canal with a world’s fair or exposition in 1915. City Park was renamed Balboa Park to honor the first European who, in 1513, reached the Pacific Ocean. There was no lack of controversy over the planning—both on the home front and up and down the state. As it turned out, San Francisco secured federal approval to host the official World’s Fair and called it the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Bay Area planners chose towering Beaux-Arts and neoclassical buildings to grace Golden Gate Park, while San Diegans selected a regional theme showcasing a Spanish fantasy city. Even though Southern California’s past reflected the simple architecture of missions and ranchos, Anglo promoters— mostly bankers, lawyers, real estate developers and merchants—convinced park planners to hire architects who could heighten the romantic aspects of the city’s Spanish beginnings. None of the elegant baroque structures planned for the fair had actually been built in southern California, but, even so, The San Diego Union predicted that the elegance of the exposition would impress all visitors and triple the city’s population. Local architect Irving Gill had some simple ideas for buildings in the park, while easterners Bertram Goodhue and his partner Carleton Winslow from a firm in New York had been impressed by Spanish Portrait of Bertram Goodhue Colonial architecture in Mexico and Spain. Previously, from Romy Wyllie, Bertram Goodhue: His Life and the accepted “fair style” was Beaux-Arts, classical Residential Architecture, Greek, or Roman. These were the styles of Chicago’s frontispiece, Courtesy of Goodhue Family Archives. famed “White City” of 1893 and San Francisco’s competing exposition. Goodhue proposed to design his buildings in baroque Spanish Colonial Revival since a “new city” of Old Spain would not only be in closer harmony with the beauty of Southern California, but would be a distinct step forward in American architecture. The Olmsted Brothers, a nationally famous landscape architectural firm, chose
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about 100 acres in the southwest corner of the park and preserve the rest of the park as open space. Their father, Frederick Law Olmsted, who had designed New York’s Central Park, believed in a maximum of green space. Fellow landscape architect Samuel Parsons agreed. Collier, appointed Director General of the Fair, disagreed and claimed to need more space and buildings to attract exhibitors and promote business growth. Goodhue and others opposed the open space plan so the Olmsted brothers quit the David C. Collier, Director project. The landscaping plan was left to John Morley. General of the 1915 Exposition. Collier brought in Engineer Frank P. Allen, Jr., of ©SDHC #OP 7831. Seattle, Washington, as Director of Works of the San Diego Exposition. Allen studied Spanish and Mexican architecture and believed the 1915 Expo could turn into what Goodhue had envisioned as a “Dream City.” One of Allen’s earliest exposition projects was construction of the Cabrillo Bridge, a structure designed in 1911 that resembled the bridge over the Rio Tajo entering Toledo, Spain. The first multiple-arched, cantilever-type bridge built in California, it spanned Cabrillo Canyon. The overpass, built of reinforced concrete at a cost of $225,154, extended 916 feet across the canyon. Its main portion comprised seven semicircular 56 foot arches for a maximum height of 120 feet to the roadway. Completion of the Panama Canal provided the region’s link to the rest of the nation not only in terms of transportation and commerce, but for military defense. By 1913, William Kettner had become a US Congressman and was San Diego’s spokesperson for the US Navy. The canal symbolized the city’s hope for future progress even though California had never brought Spain or Mexico the wealth and power that resulted from the Gold Rush. The west entrance to the park portrayed the meeting of the two oceans and the façade of Goodhue’s California building included those persons most influential in San Diego’s past. Despite the elegant structures and varied displays, the orchard plantings were perhaps the most impressive aspect of the fair for out-of-town visitors. Stacks of oranges were prominent at other fairs but not the actual trees in bloom giving off their distinct fragrance. The gardens, which had to be constantly watered because of San Diego’s average annual rainfall of ten inches, were beautiful in every direction. The Model Farm exhibit, jointly operated by several companies, demonstrated Southern California farm life. International Harvester supplied the machinery in a display of its newest technology for mechanized farming. Fair visitors gathered in great numbers to watch electric sheep shearing, compressed air cow milking, and orchard pesticide spraying. A special theater showed films on reclamation including
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“Romance of Irrigation,” and visitors could test-drive tractors. The Alhambra Cafeteria, named for Spain’s popular Moorish palace, served food to visitors while lavish dinners were prepared for important guests. These included such people as Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, William McAdoo, William Jennings Bryan, governors of several states, and local fair directors. The WCTU ladies were not happy about alcohol being served in the park, but the men won out on this issue. The Café Cristobal was another popular restaurant. The fair featured the science of anthropology in the California Building and in several others. The intention was to trace human evolution of man in the New World from savagery to civilization. Exhibits were planned Menu cover for the banquet to discover where American Indian peoples had come opening the Panama-California Exposition held at the Cafe from and to demonstrate their racial origins. The topic Cristobal, Jan. 1, 1915. ©SDHC. was controversial and was not solved at the fair. The 1915 exhibit of plein air paintings brought together by Alice Klauber drew national attention in the quadrangle’s Fine Arts Building. The very popular Indian exhibit was located beyond the central Prado where the Zoo now exists. The ten-acre Painted Desert, built and advertised by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, contained buildings resembling the pueblo architecture of New Mexico and Apache teepees in Arizona. The Trading Post featured authentic curios and souvenirs, and a resident population of some 300 southwestern Indians could be seen making pottery, weaving baskets, designing silverware, and fashioning jewelry. There were no local Indians except for one time when 200 Kumeyaay from various reservations lived at the exposition for four days. There were ceremonial dances and athletic games and Alice Klauber, Chair of the 1915 Art Committee. ©SDHC #85:15336 a cultural exchange among all the Indians present. On the way to the Painted Desert, fairgoers passed through the Isthmus—the entertainment center with exhibits promoting everything from the California missions to a Japanese Tea Pavilion. There was a House of Mirth, a Hawaiian village, a roller coaster, a Ferris wheel, and a host of unusual exhibits. A working model of the Panama Canal was built to give visitors an understanding of how
340 The 1915 Exposition
Rep. Joseph Cannon with John D. Spreckels, Panama-California Exposition, 1915. ©SDHC #3536. the Canal worked—and where it was! Nationally known visitors frequented the Park in 1915. They could be seen riding around in electriquettes and their activities have been recorded in photographs. Picture Thomas Edison chatting with Henry Ford about improvements to his automobiles or Joseph Pendleton convincing Theodore Roosevelt and his cousin Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt about the need for a naval port or a marine base in San Diego. Perhaps Maria Montessori saw the value of a project-based curriculum for young students when she saw them visiting the Pacific Film Company. California Governor Hiram Johnson had to have been impressed with the southernmost part of his state. At the end of 1915, it was decided to continue the Exposition for another year and 1916 became even more colorful and every bit as successful as 1915. Visitors and economic returns continued. Dr. Henry Wegeforth and Dr. Fred Baker were worried about what would happen to the animals brought in for display. They talked about forming a zoo, but that’s a story for another time.
For Further Reference
Amero, Richard W. Balboa Park and the 1915 Exposition. Edited by Michael Kelly. Charleston, SC: History Press, 2013. Bokovoy, Matthew F. The San Diego World’s Fairs and Southwestern Memory, 1880- 1940. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. Christman, Florence. The Romance of Balboa Park. Fourth Edition revised. San Diego: San Diego Historical Society, 1985. Kropp, Phoebe S., “The 1915 Fair” in California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006, pp. 103-156. Marshall, David. San Diego’s Balboa Park. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2007. Showley, Roger. Balboa Park: A Millennium History. Heritage Media Corporation, 2000.
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Colorized postcard of the Cabrillo Bridge, 1915. ©SDHC EPH SDCO-101.
View of the California Tower and Quadrangle looking west, 1915. ©SDHC EPH SDCO-116.
342 The 1915 Exposition
The Botanical Building with reflecting pool in the foreground, 1915. ©SDHC EPM-SDCO-102.
A view of the Varied Industries Building (today the Casa del Prado), 1915. ©SDHC PC4-300.
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Sacramento Valley Building (1915) and United States Government Building (1916) on the Plaza de Panama. Replaced in 1926 by the Fine Arts Gallery (today’s San Diego Museum of Art). ©SDHC #24181.
A view of the exterior of the San Joaquin Valley Building facing the Esplanade. ©SDHC #24112.
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Theodore Roosevelt with Charles Collier and G. Aubrey Davidson with dignitaries at the Brazilian Exhibit. © SDHC #6135.
Under Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt (4th from left) attended the Exposition. This is a rare photograph showing Roosevelt standing before he was afflicted with polio. To his right is G. Aubrey Davidson, Director of the Exposition. © SDHC #3529.
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Looking southeast across El Prado at the Commerce and Industries Building (today the Casa de Balboa). ©SDHC #AB 120.30.
Looking southeast across El Prado at the Foreign Arts Building, 1915 (today the House of Hospitality). ©SDHC #AB 120.30
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The now reconstructed House of Charm, the Indian Arts Building in 1915 today houses the Mingei museum. ©SDHC #EPH-103.
A postcard of Spreckels Organ Pavilion, 1915, one of the permanent buildings for the Fair. ©SDHC #EPH-310.
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Two young children carrying Kellogg’s Corn Flakes boxes that were bought to feed the pigeons. Corn Flakes were heavily marketed as a new consumer food product at the Exposition, 1915. ©SDHC #85: 15709.
A view in 1915 from the top of the California Tower looking west on the Cabrillo Bridge with Banker’s Hill and San Diego Bay in the distance. ©SDHC #8063.
348 The 1915 Exposition
St. Francis Chapel in the California Quadrangle (1915) designed by Bertram Goodhue. ©SDHC #8155.
Alhambra Cafe, a temporary building on the Isthmus at the Panama-California Exposition, 1915. Named after the Moorish fortress in Granada, Spain. ©SDHC #81: 11941.
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The map of the 1915 Exposition grounds. ©SDHC #82: 13172 1915.
350 The Wax and Addleson Families: Military Service Abroad and on the Homefront
By Donald H. Harrison
San Diegans can often see big blue trucks emblazoned with the name “Waxie Sanitary Supply” making deliveries all over town. Chances are if you use a restroom in an office building, a school, factory, or a government building, you will see towel and paper dispensers bearing the WAXIE name or those of the company’s vendors. Behind the Waxie name is the Wax family, which, since the end of World War II, has been participating in San Diego’s military, civic and Jewish community affairs. Immigrants from the city of Stepan, now part of Ukraine, the family made its way first to the East Coast, and then to Utah, where Ike and Sadie Wax operated general stores in succession in the small towns of Salina, Loa and Aurora. Their sons, Harry, born in New York City in 1906, and Morris, born in Salt Lake City in 1920, grew up learning how to be storekeepers—a trade that would shape their Morris Wax, US Army, World War respective careers during the Second World War. II. Courtesy of Charles Wax.
Donald H. Harrison, editor and publisher of San Diego Jewish World, is a member of the editorial board of The Journal of San Diego History and the Western States Jewish Historical Quarterly. Portions of this article are taken from several chapters of his forthcoming book commissioned by Waxie Sanitary Supply in honor of the company’s 70th anniversary in 2015.
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Current headquarters of Waxie Sanitary Supply, Kearny Mesa, San Diego. Photo courtesy of Charles Wax.
Harry became a storekeeper for the Seabees, Morris became a supply officer for the Army’s 14th Armored Division that helped liberate Europe, and Harry’s brother- in-law Herman Addleson, born in Ogden, Utah, in 1920, became a paratrooper and died in action.1 Harry Wax had worked as a regional manager for the Federal Railroad Administration in Salt Lake City prior to the war. There he fell in love with and married Ida Addleson, whose parents, Louis and Fannie Addleson, decided during the 1940s to move from Ogden, Utah, to San Diego. Ida waited out the war in San Diego with the large Addleson family, and it was for this reason that Harry, when he completed his military service, decided to look for business opportunities in San Diego rather than in Salt Lake City. The Addleson family encouraged Harry to purchase San Diego Janitor & Supply Company, then located at 10th and B Streets. In turn, Harry urged his younger brother, Morris, to come to San Diego as his partner in the janitorial and sanitary supply company that later became known as Waxie. Together, the brothers helped build their business into the largest family-owned Jan/San business in the country, one that has won frequent acknowledgment from the International Sanitary Supply Association (ISSA) as a leader in the industry. From 10th and B, the company moved to offices at 1st and G Streets, and when that second home became part of the Horton Plaza redevelopment, Waxie moved in 1978 to its current headquarters at the corner of Ruffin Road and Kearny Villa Road. On the company’s side of the street, Kearny Villa Road becomes Waxie Way.
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Wax Brothers at War
The Wax and Addleson experiences during World War II were formative for the Wax family. Brothers Harry and Morris, along with Harry’s brother-in-law Herman Addleson, served in the U.S. Armed Forces during World War II in the air, on land, and on sea. Herman gave his life, Harry lost his health, while Morris forged a life-long devotion to the military which won him the reputation as one of the U.S. Navy’s top civilian supporters. Herman’s story was both short and poignant. A patriot, Herman wanted nothing more than to serve his country in the fight against the Axis powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan. He was born with a cleft lip that automatically disqualified him from military service. Herman’s plight became known beyond the circle of his friends and immediate family. The cost of the surgery was out of the family’s range, until a former San Diegan, Boston Red Sox slugger Ted Williams, heard of the predicament of his former schoolmate and fellow baseball lover who had sold peanuts at the Pacific Coast League Padres games. Williams graciously helped pay the cost of Herman’s successful surgery.2 Herman Addleson told some of his wartime stories in letters to Dr. Lauren C. Post, a geography professor at San Diego State College (later University), who published a newsletter for and about SDSU alumni serving in the Armed Forces. On November 5, 1942, Herman wrote in a note from Camp Blanding, Florida, that some of his classmates had already achieved officer rank, and added: “I feel funny in writing and not being in the same class as they. Yet even as a ‘buck private’ (with hopes of officer training), I feel that I am proud to serve my country, no matter how small or how large my rank may be….”3 On September 18, 1943, while assigned to Camp Forrest, Tennessee, Herman told of his regimen training to become a paratrooper. “We run or shall I say ‘double time’ 6 mi, then do exercise, pushups, knee bend, etc. for 2 hrs, then take up other phases of parachute training. It (is) great & I like it, in five weeks I’ll be jumping from 1200 ft.”4 He described that first jump in an evocative letter of November 17, 1943, from Fort Benning, Georgia:
My first jump was Monday, Oct. 18, 1943, a day I’ll never forget as long as I live. We were all up at 5:45 a.m. that morning, many of us had a very restless night. Our thoughts ran in common, I guess, for our past seemed to flash through all of our minds. It was cold & foggy that day & we marched over to the field, we were all trying to sing. Yes, sing, even if our voices did crack a little. Everyone was excited, nervous & mostly scared. As we took our parachutes out
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of the bins, I looked at mine & I guess I said a pray(er). ‘Please dear chute open for me.’ As we lined up, 24 men in front of the plane, my knees felt like water…. The next commands came very fast…. The Jump master taps the first man & hollers ‘go.’ Out we go, & when you leave the door the prop-blast takes you away…. Each jump after that is the same, only with more tensifying (sic) fear as you know what’s coming. Yet it is safe as driving a car or anything else that has the word safe with it. Don’t forget, its right here, where the boys are separated from the men. I am now going to school, specialist school to become a rigger….4
On May 1, 1944, a little more than a month before D-Day, Herman wrote what would be the final letter in the collection: “Seems like a lot of [San Diego State] Aztecs are over here, yet I haven’t been able to get around to locate any, except Tom Rice & Guy Sessions, buddy paratroopers. We are going to give those Nazi(s) hell on “D” Day, so you can see old Aztec is well represented in the [101st] Airborne outfit…. If I get back alive, tell ‘Cotton’ to move over with the snow jobs, I’ll really have the latest stuff.”5 Herman did not “get back alive.” He drowned after landing in a flooded field during the D-Day invasion of Normandy, France. He was awarded a Purple Heart posthumously.6 In taking note of his death, San Diego State University’s Daily Aztec wrote: “Pvt. Herman Addleson was killed in Normandy on D-Day when he landed with the first paratroops. The official notification came to his parents following the official message saying that he was missing. Unfortunately, a fellow Aztec had reported Pvt. Addleson as being in France with him, but he seems to have been in error.“7 A plaque honoring
Veterans Memorial, Mt. Soledad, San Diego, California. Photo courtesy of Charles Wax.
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Herman’s military service has been erected at the Veterans Memorial, atop Mt. Soledad in San Diego near other plaques memorializing the military service of Harry Wax, who died in 1978, and of Morris Wax, who died in 1996. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, bringing the United States into World War II, Harry had been pursuing his career in Utah as a regional executive with the Federal Railroad Retirement Board .8 Already over 35 years of age like many members of his “greatest generation,” Harry wanted to find a way that he could translate his love for America into action. That opportunity materialized with the creation of the Navy Construction Battalions, known more popularly as the Seabees, under Rear Admiral Ben Moreell, then chief of the Navy’s Bureau of Yards and Docks.9 Harry, who worked as a supply agent rather than as a builder, turned 37 on May 13, 1943, six months after he reported for duty at the Naval Construction Center at Camp Allen in Norfolk, Virginia.10 “More than 325,000 men served with the Seabees in World War II, fighting and building on six continents and more than 300 islands. In the Pacific, where most of the construction work was needed, the Seabees landed soon after the Marines and built major airstrips, bridges, roads, warehouses, hospitals, gasoline storage tanks and housing. With the general demobilization following the war, the Construction Battalions were reduced to 3,300 men on active duty by 1950.”11 The Seabees made a point of recognizing the diversity of its personnel, even referring in its official song to the fact that the specialized unit included people of many religions, including Harry Wax’s fellow Jews (referred to in shorthand as “the Cohens”).12
The Navy wanted men That’s where we came in Mister Brown and Mister Jones The Owens, the Cohens and Flynn The Navy wanted more Of Uncle Sammy’s kin So we all joined up And brother we’re in to win.13
Harry’s military personnel file shows that on December 22, 1942 he was transferred to Davisville, Rhode Island, and assigned to the 53rd Naval Construction Battalion as a Storekeeper 1st Class, which was equivalent to an E-6 rank.14 On January 19, 1943, he received nine days leave before shipping out. He spent the furlough with his sister Ida Diamond, at her home at 30 Greendale Road,
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Veterans Memorial, Mt. Soledad, San Diego, California. Photo courtesy of Charles Wax.
in Mattapan, Massachusetts. Harry’s unit transferred back to Camp LeJeune, New River, North Carolina, and from there entrained to San Diego, his future home, where he boarded the USS Mount Vernon for a trip to Noumea, New Caledonia, which had the World War II code designation as “EPIC.”15 On arrival in Noumea, the 53rd Construction Battalion immediately set about constructing three Marine Corps camps for 2,000 men each, as well as an airfield requiring a parking area of 180,000 square feet. In between these assignments, the battalion trained for combat. From Noumea, Harry’s unit in October 1943, sailed north to Guadalcanal (code name Bevy) in the Solomon Islands, which had been wrested earlier in the year from Japanese forces. There, in concert with the First Marine Amphibious Corps, the 53rd Construction Battalion trained for the November 1 invasion of Bougainville, also in the Solomon Islands. The 53rd Construction Battalion worked quickly and effectively. “By the close of the assault stage of the invasion, the battalion had built three airfields, a bomber strip 6,000 feet long and 250 feet wide and two fighter strips each 4,000 feet long and 200 feet wide. It also built almost four miles of road through the thickest jungle swamp to be encountered.” On January 6, 1944, Harry was transferred to U.S. Navy Hospital No. 8 for treatment of an unspecified ailment, returning to the 53rd Naval Construction Battalion more than a month later on February 21. From Bougainville, the unit transferred back to Guadalcanal where it trained for the July 21, 1944 invasion of Guam, the southernmost island of the Mariana Islands chain. According to the 53rd Construction Battalion history, here’s what occurred:
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One officer and 17 enlisted men equipped with tractors went ashore at four minutes past H-hour to help the Marines unload Sherman tanks from mechanized landing craft and tank landing ships. Three of the tanks sank into bomb craters on the ocean bottom, but the detachment managed to salvage two of the tanks in two hours while under intense enemy mortar and small arms fire.16
What Harry did and saw during this assault has gone unrecorded, but it had a pronounced impact upon him. On July 27, six days after the initial assault, he was transferred to the temporary United States Naval Hospital at Aiea Heights in Honolulu, the first step toward his ultimate honorable discharge with a diagnosis of “anxiety neurosis” aggravated by his combat experience. On November 1, 1944, Harry was transferred to the Naval Convalescent Hospital at Santa Cruz, from which he was honorably discharged to civilian life on December 5, 1944. Harry was credited with a total of two years, three months and 21 days in the military, and that was further broken down as having included 23 months active service, within which 18 months and nine days were spent overseas, and 3 months were within a combat area. He was entitled to wear the Asiatic Pacific Area Ribbon with one Bronze Star.17 Whereas Harry faltered under the strain of military service, his brother Morris, 14 years his junior, thrived as a U.S. Army supply officer. After being called up for World War II service, Morris was sent to Camp Roberts in Paso Robles, California, for training.18 With the knowledge of general store operations that he had learned from his parents, within a little more than a year Morris was coming to the attention of his commanding officer. Major Charles B. Cross, commandant of the Headquarters Battery at the 40th Division Artillery Training Center, in Yakima, Washington, noted in July 1942 that before Sergeant Morris Wax arrived,
our supply problem was very disorganized. We were attempting to train new selectees and at the same time securing from various sources the necessary equipment for this training. Sergeant Wax took hold of this situation and in a surprisingly short time he had drawn equipment from three different Army Posts scattered at various distances and our supply problem was cleared up in a highly satisfactory manner.
Major Cross recommended that Morris be promoted to a warrant officer. But Morris didn’t become a warrant officer; instead he was selected to go to officers’ training school at Fort Knox, Kentucky. Thereafter, he was granted a temporary
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Veterans Memorial, Mt. Soledad, San Diego, California. Photo courtesy of Charles Wax.
commission as an Army second lieutenant effective December 2, 1942, with the commission “to continue in force during the pleasure of the President of the United States for the time being, and for the duration of the present emergency and six months thereafter unless sooner terminated,” according to an official notification from Major J. M. Worthington, Secretary for the Armored Forces. Although he officially remained an infantry officer, Morris became a supply officer in the Tank Corps.19 Second Lieutenant Morris Wax missed the start-up in October 1942 of the 14th Armored Division at Camp Chaffee, Arkansas, by two months but he was assigned to this unit following completion of Officers Training at Fort Knox. Morris soon learned and excelled at the Army supply system. Discussing the division’s start-up period, in The History of the 14th Armored Division, Captain Joseph Carter gave readers a taste of the meticulousness with which the Army looked after its property—a fastidiousness that Morris would carry with him into civilian life as he built up San Diego Janitor and Chemical Supply Co. into what would become the sprawling WAXIE empire.20 Herb Strauss, a master sergeant, remembered seeing Morris and other “90-day wonders” from Fort Knox as they joined the 14th Armored Division. It took only three months at officers’ school for candidates to be transformed into officers, thus the facetious nickname. Strauss, who would become a warrant officer in charge of billeting for the battalion, noticed that Morris wore his officer’s cap a little cockeyed, and decided there was something about the man he liked. They became pals. “I called him ‘Mo’ like everybody else, but when he was out of the Army, he was known in San Diego as ‘Morrie.’ And you know his wife, Jeannette,
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well she didn’t like the idea of anyone calling him ‘Mo,’” reflected Strauss at 90 in 2011, some 67 years after they met.21 In July 1944, Brig. Gen. A.C. Smith, the man who would lead Morris Wax and 10,000 other soldiers into battle, took over command of the Division from Major General V.E. Prichard, who had overseen its training.22 In that same month, Morris was promoted from 2nd lieutenant to 1st lieutenant, his orders signed by his friend, the adjutant, Herbert W. Strauss, who by then had been promoted to a chief warrant officer. In the summer, soldiers were told to take two weeks leave if they had not already had one in the last six months, but to return to camp by September 20. They would be shipping out. Other orders told them what to pack, what to send home.23 Division historian Carter reported that only five days were needed at Morris’s next duty station, Camp Shanks, N.Y., to get the Division ready to board the ships that would take soldiers to the destiny for which most of them had been training for well over a year. Shanks, located in Orangeburg, in New York’s Hudson Valley, 19 miles north of New York City, was known to the 1.5 million soldiers who passed through there as “Last Stop USA.” There were drills covering embarkation and procedures for abandoning ships, should that become necessary—and for Morris, that would have been a serious problem because, according to Charles Wax’s recollection, “my dad never learned to swim!” The soldiers were briefed on what to do if captured, and they were given final physicals. They were also permitted to visit New York City, provided they removed the 14th Armored Division patches from their shoulders and spoke to no one about where they might be going— just in case spies were monitoring troop movements. Next, Division personnel were transported by train to Weehawken, New Jersey, where their ships awaited. “Curious men and women, open-mouthed boys, watched the troops through the wood fences, serious faced, heavy laden, feeling a million different thoughts. Going over. A song and a fear, a proudness and a sadness….”24 Departing aboard the Santa Rosa, officers were berthed six to a cabin, on upper decks, whereas enlisted men were crowded onto hammocks, four high, in crannies and holds on lower decks, recalled Herb Strauss.25 Seasickness was rampant and when soldiers couldn’t make it off their hammocks, they used their steel helmets for receptacles of their nausea. Just visiting the men, as officers were supposed to do twice daily, made the officers feel guilty about their far superior accommodations, according to Strauss. Morris, recorded in the Army records by his service number 01014666, on December 29, 1944, was awarded the Bronze Star for Meritorious Service during this campaign. Then a First Lieutenant with the service Company of the Tank Battalion, he was cited for
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…meritorious service in actions as Acting Battalion Supply Officer in France from 1 November 1944 to 27 December 1944. His sound judgment and untiring efforts in servicing and delivering necessary supplies and equipment to combat troops facilitated the expeditious movement of his unit…. During operation in the Vosges Mountains, Lieutenant Wax successfully supported not only his own battalion, but assisted in supplying an entire command. His aggressiveness in processing and delivering supplies to troops in actual combat were of material assistance in contributing to the high state of morale of his unit. /s/Brigadier General A.C. Smith.26
While the citation made no mention of this, one of Morris’s unfortunate duties was to evacuate charred bodies from a tank that had been disabled by enemy fire. His son Charles recalled that, “dad said it was the most gruesome thing he had ever seen—and he was relieved that he never was called upon to do it again!”27 Strauss, who received a Bronze Star for his efforts under fire to keep front-line troops supplied with mail, recalled that it was not until after V.E. Day that the medals were actually pinned onto their chests during a ceremony near Nuremberg, Germany. “We lined up, there were about maybe 40 of us—and Patton was supposed to come by but he was too busy, of course, and the commanding general, A.C. Smith, pinned them all on us,” Strauss later would relate.There had been no opportunity for the ceremony until then.28 On January 9, 1945, the Division launched a twin attack against the villages of Hatten and Rittershoffen, which a U.S. Army Group Commander (Lt. Gen. Jacob Devers) later described as “one of the greatest defensive battles of the war.” Resting during February, the Division “jumped off again on 18 March, broke through the Siegfried Line on 23 March, and, driving to the Rhine, took Germersheim on the 24th. It crossed the river on 1 April, passed through 3rd Infantry Division, and striking northeast took Lohr on the 2nd and Gemunden on the 5th….“29 One day before the Division crossed the Rhine, Morris was recommended for promotion from 1st lieutenant to captain. His commanding officer, Lt. Col. Ernest C. Watson, wrote in the notice of promotion that Morris “has clearly demonstrated his fitness for the responsibilities and duties of the position and grade….” Furthermore, said Watson, “to the best of my knowledge and belief he is the best fitted officer available in this command for the grade and position for which promotion is recommended.” That Easter crossing of the Rhine River in 1945 would always be memorable to Morris because on that day the Combat Command Reserve (CCR) he then was assigned to, drew the wrath
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of General George Patton Jr., who was standing on the eastern side of the Rhine. Patton spotted the sandbags that had been piled up on CCR’s tanks even though they were moving in an area that previously had been cleared of Germans. Patton, in his high voice, gave all within hearing distance, including Morris in his jeep, a royal chewing out, calling them “yellow- bellied cowards,” and worse, saying the sandbags slowed down the tanks and also caused them to burn more fuel. Morris may not have enjoyed the experience as it happened, but it was one of the few moments of the war that 30 General George S. Patton, World War II. Public he always enjoyed retelling. domain photo-01LG. Meanwhile, on April 16, 1945, Morris’ promotion to captain was officially confirmed in orders issued by Major General Arthur White. “The division passed through the 86th Infantry Division bridgehead at Ingolstadt on the 27th and fought south to the Isar River, capturing Moosburg on 29 April and liberating an estimated 110,000 allied prisoners….” The prisoners had been held at Stalag VII-A, the largest prisoner of war camp in Germany. The following day, the division continued its advance, “crossing the Inn River and establishing bridgeheads at Jettenbach and Muhldorf on 2 May.” Muhldorf was the location of the Ampfing Concentration Camp, which, because of signage identifying it as a sub-camp of Dachau, many members of Morris’ unit later mistakenly believed it was Dachau itself. What the soldiers of the 14th Armored Division saw at the Ampfing subcamp of Dachau made Morris and his fellow veterans later wince with the memory. One camp held “1,500 Jewish prisoners;“ the other was filled “with Jewish female inmates. The unit reported that of the 1,500 prisoners in the first camp, only 900 could walk, and that the lime pits were filled with the corpses of inmates.”31 On December 15, 1945, Morris was accepted as an officer in the U.S. Army Reserve, reverting to inactive status on February 22, 1946. At that time, it was noted on Morris’s record that he was “authorized to wear two Bronze Service Stars for participation in Rhineland and Central Europe campaigns.”32
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San Diego Supply Co. (original Waxie building). ©SDHC Sensor #5-812.
Wax Family on the Homefront
Following the war, upon the urging of his brother Harry, Morris Wax came home to San Diego in late 1945 to join him as a partner in San Diego Janitor & Supply Company, which had a storefront operation at the corner of 10th Avenue and B Street. With some skepticism about tying his fate to a company that, at that time, had four employees and one truck “with no second gear,” Morris cast his lot with his older brother. Over the next 70 years, the company, later to be known as WAXIE Sanitary Supply, grew to become the largest family-owned janitorial and sanitary supply company in the United States, employing in 2014 over 800 employees at 20 facilities throughout nine western states. In the 1950s the company moved to a warehouse location at 1st and G Streets; in the 1970s to the corner of Ruffin and Kearny Villa Roads in Kearny Mesa, and in the 1990s, a major expansion of its offices, warehouse, and parking facilities, involved cutting through the Kearny Mesa property a road that was named Waxie Way.33 Throughout this time, Morrie’s interest in all things military grew to include leadership positions in the Navy League, the USO, and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). Morris clearly had relished the time that he had spent in the military. “He loved it, he loved the order, he loved the camaraderie, the friendships, the teamwork,” said his oldest son Charles, who today is the chief executive officer of WAXIE Sanitary Supply. “He loved the discipline, he loved the structure and knowing what you were going to do every day. You had to keep moving ahead all the time, and he ran the business that way. He believed you had to take care of your customers, you had to get things done, and you had to keep your word.” In the military, “Morris learned to take orders, but he was a hell of a lot better at giving them!” Charles said.
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“As a kid, I didn’t really understand him,” Charles continued:
He would get up really early and get to work early. In the military you do that, you rise and shine, and he believed in that very strongly, and he wanted things to be clean and he wanted things to be right. He wanted to have good equipment so people can do their jobs right. But also he had a great love for military. He knew what they went through, how they put their lives on the line, and he had the greatest respect for military people. That’s why he became so involved in the Navy League and the USO because he wanted to do anything he could to help the servicemen and the military people have a better life because they have a very tough, stressful life, and they are always moving and always having to leave their families. It’s tough, not an easy life.34
Morris’s decision to remain in the Army Reserves resulted in his being notified in February 1951 of his activation as an Army captain to take effect March 25, 1951, with orders to report to Camp Cooke, California. A few days later, however, his date to report to Camp Cooke was officially delayed to July 1, 1951. A few months later, it was delayed again to November 1, 1951, and then, yet again, to February 1, 1952.35 Morris’s nephew Frank Lerner was sent to boot camp at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in
USO headquarters in the Masonic building during World War II ca San Diego, prompting 1944. ©SDHC #14AFDDB. a request from Frank’s mother, Yetta Lerner, to her brother Morris to make sure the young Marine was okay. “One Saturday he came to visit me,” Frank Lerner recalled:
The officer of the day came to my drill sergeant and asked to let me see my uncle. He said no. The officer of the day went back and the next thing I know, the drill sergeant sent me to see him. I think
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USO information on Horton Plaza during World War II. ©SDHC 80: 3868.
my uncle (then an Army captain) pulled rank and knowing Uncle Morris I am sure he can be demanding on anybody. I went to see him and he asked how I was doing, that my mom was worried…. The next day I got my ass kicked all over the place from the drill sergeant. He made me jump over our locker boxes for about 30 minutes or longer and I had shin marks for a damn long time. I wrote my mom and told her not to send Uncle Morris to see me anymore….36
In January 1955, Morris, by then a major, completed his service in the U.S. Army reserves.37 The friendships that he cultivated through the Navy League, the USO, and JINSA led to him occupy an important position in San Diego. More so than anyone except perhaps the mayor, he provided the linkage between the civilian community and the military establishment. “That was Morrie’s special niche in the community,” longtime friend Gert Thaler once commented. Whereas his brother Harry had helped lead such Jewish organizations as the B’nai B’rith, United Jewish Fund, and the Jewish Community Center, Morrie had Jewish community involvements, but “his life was devoted to his connection with the U.S. military and particularly to the USO project to which he was a most generous philanthropist.”38
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“Whenever Morrie had parties,” remembered Fern Murphy, who was a strong supporter of the USO, “there’d be a mixture there of his Jewish friends and his non-Jewish military friends.”39 Charles added: “A lot of people might be surprised to learn that one of the strongest supporters of the military in San Diego was Jewish.”40 From 1970 through 1972, Morris served as president of the USO in San Diego, and, according to a tribute placed in the Congressional Record on June 23, 1982, by Congressman Bill Lowery (R-San Diego):
Morrie was out front and very instrumental in raising the money and working with the city of San Diego in the construction of a new USO center for the large military population and due to his efforts that facility was opened on September 22, 1970. However, 10 years later, when the city was forced to relocate the USO, once again it was Morrie who took the lead in finding a site, raising the money and supervising the construction of a new USO center. Because of his efforts the new center was dedicated to Mr. Wax upon its opening in 1980. His terms as president of the USO have been in the years 1970-72 and 1980-82, and for the past 11 years he has initiated the fund drive to finance special holiday dinners and snacks for servicemen and women on Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, and Christmas and throughout those holiday periods. For the past 6 years he has led USO board members in ticket sales for the annual fund-raising party.41
The USO in San Diego has had numerous homes. From Thanksgiving Day 1941 through 1947 it was located at 7th and E Streets, close to San Diego’s Main Library. Reopening in 1950 for the Korean War, it was placed in the basement of the Spreckels Building near 2nd and Broadway, where it stayed until 1971. Morris Wax, Robert Murphy and Otto Hirr, all of them veterans, worked together to have the USO moved to improved quarters at India and F Street. Nine years after that, it was time to move the USO again to 433 Harbor Drive, Mr. and Mrs. Harry Wax with Abba Eban, Ambassador from Israel, March 1958. into a building close to the San Diego ©SDHC UT #85: 4539-1 Wax H#14933F4. Convention Center. It was “dedicated
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to Morris Wax in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the goals and objectives of the USO,” according to a plaque below a bust of Morris that stood in the building’s lobby. Ribbon- cutting ceremonies in 1980 had featured Morris and Jeannette Wax along with San Diego Mayor Pete Wilson and the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Thomas B. Hayward. Morris was again the honoree on February 23, 1991, at a fundraiser for the USO that was held as San Diego’s attention was focused across the world on the Gulf War.42 When the USO had to make room Photo courtesy of Charles Wax. in 1995 for the Convention Center’s expansion, Morris again led a fundraising campaign to finance the move to its present location at 303 A Street downtown, where the organization took a 50-year lease. Morris’s bust and plaque were moved with the USO. The two-story USO center features “giant television screens and a library, pool tables, pinball machines and video games; a dance floor and disc-jockey booth, meeting rooms and a stainless-steel kitchen. There are even showers in the restrooms,” reported Roger Showley of the San Diego Union-Tribune. “Am I totally happy with this place?” Morrie asked rhetorically. “No, I’m not, but it’s the best we can do.” He told Showley that the lack of parking on site was the most serious drawback.43 The USO was only one aspect of Morrie’s devotion to the military and the nation it served. From 1970 through 1975, during the Vietnam War, he served as a member of the Selective Service Committee, commonly referred to as the Draft Board, and dating back to 1966 was an active supporter of the Navy League. He was also called upon by Pete Wilson and other U.S. senators from California over the years to make suggestions for their appointments to the nation’s military academies. Being on the draft board was a difficult position for his father, Charles said. “Many people didn’t want to serve because there was so much unhappiness with the draft. It was not a popular spot, but he did it.”44 While serving as president of the San Diego Council of the Navy League in 1978, Morris got behind the effort of the newly organized United States Navy Memorial Foundation to erect a national monument in honor of all United States Navy personnel who served, fought, and died for their country, as well as to
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endow a scholarship fund for their children. Today, the Navy Memorial Center is located on Pennsylvania Avenue, between 7th Street Northwest and 9th Street Northwest, in Washington, D.C.45 The following year Morris was selected by the Navy to serve as chairman of the commissioning ceremony at North Island Naval Air Station for the amphibious assault ship USS Essex. Ship commissioning ceremonies were not as common on the West Coast as they were on the East Coast, making the selection of Morris a particular honor. The honor of chairing a commissioning ceremony for a Navy ship —that is being in charge of a ceremony that brings the ship into active service—fell again to Morris in 1993 with the guided missile destroyer John Paul Jones. The Secretary of the Navy, John H. Dalton, on July 25, 1994, issued a meritorious public service citation to Morris. It complimented him “for his full and unswerving attention to the cause of greater public knowledge and understanding of the nation’s need for strong maritime forces.”46 The citation went on to say about Morris: “His exceptional leadership and dedication have led to maximum support and recognition of the Navy, especially in the San Diego community. His significant contributions to enhanced public awareness and community support of the Sea Service have furthered the Navy League and its goals in support of these services.” In March 1996, Morris again was selected to be chairman of a commissioning ceremony, this time for the destroyer USS Benfold. This was his final act of public service in behalf of the military. He died nine months later. Morris always had the interests of military service personnel at heart, and recognizing how lonely they were, away from home on important holidays, he rallied San Diegans to their cause. Charles remembers his father underwriting turkey-dinner programs at the USO for Thanksgiving, and successfully stirring members of the Jewish community to volunteer on Christmas day so that Christians in a variety of civilian jobs in support of the military could have that day off. Charles Wax recalled that his father became incensed when he heard that
Morris Wax at his desk in the offices of WAXIE in the Haifa USO might close. Morris 1979. ©SDHC UT90: Q0903-27a Wax #14920F6. promptly raised the $60,000 that USO
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officials said was necessary to keep it open. Years later, when President Barack Obama nominated Chuck Hagel to become Secretary of Defense, there was an outcry from Israel supporters, including Charles, who recalled that Hagel had headed the USO when the Haifa facility was threatened.47 When Morris died, the USO in Haifa lost its champion. “USO (in Haifa) is closed now, and I must let you know that the hardest thing for me was to take down the American flag from the building,” wrote Gilla Gerzon, director Colin Powell, Secretary of State. Internet photo. of Haifa USO. “I did it at 3 a.m., so that no one would be around to see me crying.”48 After Morrie helped with the USO in Haifa, Shoshana Bryen recalled, “we elected Morrie to the JINSA Board and he became an active supporter of our Flag and General Officers Program in Israel. He participated in two of them and helped us meet some of the most active and influential retired officers of the time. Everyone knew Morrie.”49 Among the “everyone” of Morris’ acquaintance was Colin Powell, whom he met in 1981 at a party in the South Korean Embassy in Washington D.C. Powell, a future chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and later the U.S. Secretary of State, was then a colonel. On a visit in 1994 to Morrie and his second wife Alice at their home in the Alvarado Estates neighborhood of San Diego, General Colin Powell had time to know members of Morrie’s family. Charles remembered “My dad invited my daughter Amy and me to his house. We were told he had only 15-30 minutes, but we ended up staying almost two hours sitting around the kitchen table. I was extremely impressed with him, not only because of all the great accomplishments, but because of his easy nature and how comfortable he made us feel.”50 As the keynote speaker at the Republican National Convention in San Diego in 1996, Powell was again a house guest for several nights at Morris’s home and also paid a visit during the day to WAXIE headquarters in Kearny Mesa.51 That very evening Powell was scheduled to address the Republican National Convention, Charles recalled: “He went to dad’s home, and Morrie asked if there was anything special he wanted for lunch, and Powell replied, ‘just give me a hamburger, or whatever,’ and they got him a hamburger from Rory’s on Mission Gorge Road, and he ate the hamburger and went in for a nap and fell asleep. I would say that if I were giving a speech in front of millions of people, I tell you the adrenalin
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would run really high, and no way would I be able to take a nap! But he was able to make the speech without any notes—no problem whatsoever.” Powell wrote to the Waxes afterwards: “Dear Morrie and Alice, Thank you again for your hospitality. I really needed the quiet and beauty of your house to get ready for the speech. More importantly was your friendship.... And to have Alice Wax cook food for me is honor beyond the pale. Thanks my dear friends. I hope to see you again soon. Much love.”52 Morris, who had hoped in vain for a liver transplant, had been ailing for some time with cryptogenic cirrhosis (non-alcohol related) before his death on Tuesday, December 24, 1996, and one could see in photographs taken that year how gaunt he had become. “’Cryptogenic diseases’ are those for which the cause is unknown and the irony of it was that my dad rarely drank alcohol, I don’t think I ever saw him drink a beer, but on occasion, he would have a Crown Royal whiskey with a Coke,” Charles reflected. “Certainly not enough to develop the common form of cirrhosis. Whatever caused his illness, at the end he was so sick, he was unable to get out of bed for more than a few moments.”53 Morris was cheered and touched by a letter lauding his life that was sent to him December 13 by Secretary of the Navy John Dalton:
On behalf of the United States Naval Service, I would like to personally thank you for everything you have done over the years for our Sailors and Marines in San Diego and around the globe. I know the Fifth Annual Holiday Band Concert this past weekend was a tremendous success and this was due to your sponsorship and leadership. It is very rare one individual can make such a positive difference in how the public and our naval personnel, military and civilian, feel about the Navy and the Marine Corps. Your work over the years has accomplished that and more. It has saved us money, but more importantly your personal efforts have made life better for our Sailors and Marines in their daily lives. The young men and women who daily use the Morris Wax San Diego USO know what a tremendous difference you have made. I hope you are feeling better in the very near future. Again, thank you on behalf of our sailors, marines and their families. You are a very special member of our Navy/Marine Corps team. I hope to see you on my next visit to San Diego.54
Not too many days after reading that message, Morris received a personal reminder how much he was appreciated by the American military. His son Charles related the circumstances: “Saturday, December 21, about 10:30 in the morning, the phone rang. I answered it. It was General Colin Powell asking to speak to
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my dad. I don’t know if it was special karma or spirit, because it was the only time during that five-day period that my dad was able to take a phone call.” Powell “was the last person” that Morris “ever spoke to by telephone while he was alive, I will never forget,” Charles said. “What I remember so vividly about this conversation is listening to the both of them say ‘Thank you for what you have done for the country, for your service, and for your friendship’—they both said it to each other—and it was a very, very moving time for me.”55 A short time before his death, Morris had been “diagnosed with having an incurable liver disease,” Rabbi Leonard Rosenthal of Tifereth Israel Synagogue told mourners at the funeral service. “Despite the best medical care and the love and support of his family, there was not too much that could be done for him.” Morrie died in peace. His funeral was held at Congregation Beth Israel, where he had served on the board of directors, and his burial was in the Jewish mausoleum at Greenwood Cemetery in San Diego. An obituary, which was the lead story in the San Diego Union-Tribune’s local section, mentioned that in addition to his many military affiliations, Morris Wax had been involved in a variety of other organizations and causes. “In 1991, he was honored for his efforts on behalf of the United Negro College Fund, and in 1993 he received the group’s Dr. Frederick D. Patterson Award. In May 1996, he was one of fifteen business owners honored by the Greater San Diego Chamber of Commerce, the U.S. Small Business Administration and Wells Fargo Bank,” the obituary noted. The newspaper also reported that Morrie “was a member of the San Diego Chamber of Commerce, Masonic Lodge No. 35, and the board of the San Diego Anti-Defamation League, among others.” It mentioned his service on the International Sanitary Supply Association (ISSA) board, as well as the “Southern California Committee for Employers Support for National Guard and Reserves, the Selective Service Board, the 1993 Holiday Bowl Committee, (and) the Jewish Community Center.”56
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Charles Wax, left, president of WAXIE Sanitary Supply with brother David Wax, executive vice president. The San Diego Union-Tribune, August 10, 1996.
So numerous were Morrie’s honors that a complete listing was not possible in the obituary. But it should be noted that in 1988, along with Congressman Clair W. Burgener, a Mormon; retired school teacher Audrey F. Chung, a Catholic; and George Georggin, a Greek Orthodox; that Morris, a Jew, was selected to be one of the honorees of the local chapter of the National Conference of Christians and Jews. In his memory, his sons planted a grove of 1,000 trees in Israel under auspices of the Jewish National Fund. In May 1997, five months after Morris’s death, he was the posthumous honoree at the USO’s Showtime Gala. President Bill Clinton wrote a letter for the occasion from the White House. It said that he joined “in honoring Morris Wax for his lifelong support and leadership of the USO.”57 “The ceremony took place on the USS Pearl Harbor where Admiral (Hugh) Webster and the captain of the ship spoke.” The citation on the plaque read: “USS Pearl Harbor (LSD 52) Mess Deck is dedicated to the memory of Morris Wax whose numerous contributions to the men and women of the U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps are forever appreciated.”58
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NOTES 1. Charles Wax in numerous interviews with Donald H. Harrison, Dec. 13, 2011-October 27, 2014. 2. Herman Addleson to Lauren Post, November 5, 1942, Lauren C. Post Papers (hereafter LCPP), San Diego State University Special Collections and University Archives. Sadie Addleson Breitbard, one of Ida’s sisters, told Charles Wax that their brother Herman’s cleft lip initially precluded him from joining the service, but recruiters said if he had it repaired, he could be accepted into the Army. 3. Herman Addleson to Lauren Post, November 5, 1942, September 18, 1943, LCPP. 4. Herman Addleson to Lauren Post, September 18, 1943, October 18, 1943, LCPP. 5. Herman Addleson to Lauren Post, May 1, 1944. 6. Herman Addleson plaque, Mount Soledad Veterans Memorial, San Diego. Aztec News Letter, Sept. 1, 1944, http://www.rohan.sdsu.edu/nas/streaming/dept/scua/SPECCOLL/Collections/ WWIIServicemensCorrespondence/AztecNewsletterComplete.pdf. 7. Herman Addleson to Lauren Post, February 10, 1944. 8. See “Increased Employment,” Ogden Standard-Examiner, March 2, 1941, page 16-A; “Call Made for 250 Laborers For Rail Jobs,” Ogden Standard-Examiner, June 1, 1941, Section 2, page 1; “Coast Lines Need Switchers, Keymen,” Ogden Standard-Examiner, June 19, 1941, page 10A; “Railroaders Requested To File Reports,” Ogden Standard-Examiner, June 29, 1941, page 2B; and “Migrant Workers Settle Down to Defense Project Jobs,” Ogden Standard-Examiner, Oct. 26, 1941, page 19B. 9. “We Build, We Fight,” http://www.navy.mil/navydata/navy_legacy_hr.asp?id=245 ; accessed Feb. 3, 2011. According to a U.S. Navy website, “The earliest Seabees were recruited from the civilian construction trades and were placed under the leadership of the Navy’s Civil Engineer Corps. Because of the emphasis on experience and skill rather than on physical standards, the average age of Seabees during the early days of the war was 37.” 10. Arlene Orlansky (niece of Harry Wax) interview with Donald H. Harrison, February 1, 2011.
11. “We Build, We Fight.” 12. Words by Sam M. Lewis; Music by Peter de Rose. 13. http://www.navy.mil/navydata/navy_legacy_hr.asp?id=246 (accessed February 3, 2011). 14. 201 Military Personnel File for Harry Wax, Service No. 660-41-78; Private archives of WAXIE Sanitary Supply. 15. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Mount_Vernon_%28AP-22%29 {accessed October 17, 2012}. Before the war, USS Mount Vernon had been operated as the passenger ship SS Washington by United States Lines. With eight passenger decks, it measured 705 feet-3 inches long, 86 feet wide, and displaced 24,289 gross rated tons. Capable of speeds up to 20.5 knots, Mount Vernon carried for its defense four 5” guns and four 3” guns. 16. “We Build, We Fight.” 17. Military Personnel File for Harry Wax, op. cit. 18. National Archives and Records Administration. U.S. World War II Army Enlistment Records, 1938-1946 [database on line] Provo, UT, USA: The Generations Network, Inc. 19. Military Personnel File for Morris Wax, Service No. 010-14-666; Private archives of WAXIE Sanitary Supply. 20. Charles Wax in numerous interviews with Donald H. Harrison, Dec. 13, 2011-October 27, 2014. Joseph Carter, “Training and P.O.M., January 13-October 13, 1944 (chapter 4),” The History of the 14th Armored Division, published shortly after World War II, no page numbers. Thanks to Herbert Strauss who kindly loaned the book to Harrison.
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21. Ibid. 22. Herbert Strauss, interview with Donald H. Harrison in San Diego, February 15, 2011. 23. Carter, “Training and P.O.M.” 24. Meryl Pollack to Donald H. Harrison, Meryl Pollack, phone interview from Brooklyn with Donald H. Harrison, October 3, 2011. Charles Wax interviews. 25. Carter, “Training and P.O.M.” Perhaps some soldiers were pleased to know that their ship’s namesake, Rose of Lima, was the first Catholic saint from the Americas. Many years after the war, the name “Santa Rosa” would take on a whole new meaning in the Wax household: Santa Rosa, California, was the hometown of Randi Cohen, who became the wife of Charles Wax, and daughter-in-law of Morris. 26. Robert Correll, “The U.S. Army Transport, Santa Rosa.” http://www.488thportbattalion.org/ The_Santa_Rosa.html , accessed February 21, 2011. “History of the 14th Armored Division,” summary, uncredited. The document is among memorabilia of Morris kept by Waxie Sanitary Supply in his former office, later occupied by Harry Babb. Carter, “Training and P.O.M.” Don Beamgard to Charles Wax, Feb.3, 1999, Private archives of Charles Wax. 27. Military Personnel Record for Morris Wax; Charles Wax interviews. 28. Strauss interview, February 15, 2011. 29. Carter “Training and P.O.M.” 30. Strauss interview, February 15, 2011. 31. Military Personnel File for Morris Wax. 32. Strauss interview, February 15, 2011. 33. Charles Wax interviews. 34. Ibid. 35. Military Personnel File for Morris Wax. 36. Frank Lerner, email to Donald H. Harrison, Oct. 23, 2011. Lerner continued: “I assume my drill sergeant did not like to be told what to do. Also, being Jewish in the Marines with this drill sergeant was not great, trust me. Being in boot camp is to break you down so that when they gave you an order you did it without thinking about it. It was great once you got out, but not so damn good while going through it. Fourteen weeks is a long time in the summer in San Diego.” 37. Military Personnel File for Morris Wax. 38. Gert Thaler to Donald H. Harrison, April 21, 2011. 39. Fern Murphy, interview with Donald H. Harrison, May 4, 2011. 40. Charles Wax interviews.
41. Bill Lowery, “Tribute to Mr. Morrie Wax,” Congressional Record, “Extension of Remarks,” June 23, 1982, Page 15913. 42. Jeanne Beach Eigner, “USO salutes troops as institution turns 50,” San Diego Union-Tribune, February 25, 1991. 43. Roger M. Showley, “San Diego USO begins new tour of duty at downtown site,” San Diego Union-Tribune, October 1, 1995. 44. Charles Wax interviews. 45. “Gray Lady Down,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_Lady_Down; accessed September 14, 2012. 46. Jeff Roberts, interview with Donald H. Harrison, August 11, 2011. Jeff Roberts, who in 2012 would be named WAXIE’s president, recalled being invited with other WAXIE employees to
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the Point Loma Theater for the gala premiere, “with lights, limousines pulling up and that was real fun. I was a youngster, they probably figured I was there to sell popcorn.” 47. United States Navy Memorial Foundation, citation, March 3, 1978, part of Waxie historical exhibit at One Waxie Way. 48. John Butvich, interview with Donald H. Harrison, May 30, 2012; Shoshana Bryen to Donald H. Harrison, April 10, 2011; Marsha Halteman, interview with Donald H. Harrison, Nov. 10, 2011; Gilla Gerzon to Donald H. Harrison, February 12, 2012. 49. Shoshana Bryen to Donald Harrison, April 10, 2011. 50. Charles Wax interviews. 51. David Wax, “General Colin Powell Receives San Diego Welcome,” Hot Wax, March 1995, Page 1. Corey M. Miller, “Colin Powell Shares Long Friendship with S.D. Businessman,” San Diego Daily Transcript, August 14, 1996, Pages 1, 16. 52. Colin L Powell to Morris and Alice Wax, 1996, letter on the wall of the Waxie historical museum. 53. Charles Wax interviews. 54. John Dalton to Morris Wax, Dec. 13, 1996, Letter on display in Waxie historical musuem. 55. Charles Wax interviews. 56. James Steinberg, “Businessman Morris Wax dies,” San Diego Union-Tribune, December 26, 1996. Pages B-1, 10. 57. Bill Clinton to San Diego USO, May 23 1997.
58. “USO Holiday Band Concert,” Hot Wax, March 1998, Page 5.
374 On the Cusp of an American Civil Rights Revolution: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Final Visit and Address to San Diego in 1964
By Seth Mallios and Breana Campbell
Legendary civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s last appearance in San Diego in the late spring of 1964 came at the apex of one of the most important and volatile moments in the nation’s history. Collectively, participants in the American Civil Rights movement of the early 1960s endured an onslaught of racially motivated and targeted political deceit, police brutality, and murder. Simultaneously, they inspired the rise of unprecedented social activism through non-violent civil disobedience as a means to expose racial injustice. Fewer than six weeks after King’s trip to San Diego, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson would sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964, formally outlawing discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. This time was also one of King’s most celebrated periods; during 1963-64, he gave likely the most important speech of the 20th century in August 1963,1 was named Time magazine’s “Man of the Year” in December 1963, and would be the youngest person ever (at the age of 35) to win the Nobel Peace Prize in December 1964. Despite mammoth personal acclaim and national advancement for his primary cause—the end of segregation—King did not come to San Diego for accolades or praise; he ventured to the city as part of a statewide tour to rally California voters against Proposition 14, which was
Seth Mallios is Professor and Chair of the Anthropology Department and Director of the South Coastal Information Center at San Diego State University. He recently published Hail Montezuma!: The Hidden Treasures of San Diego State (2012). Breana Campbell, B.A. in Liberal Arts and Anthropology (2010) from San Diego State University, currently works for the South Coastal Information Center managing archaeological data from San Diego and Imperial Counties.
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on the upcoming November (1964) state ballot. Were it to pass, this proposed law would undo California’s 1963 Rumford Act, which prohibited racial discrimination in housing. San Diego was generally hostile to King’s social and political causes, even though the Baptist minister was already a global icon. This conservative Southern California town was especially backward when it came to civil rights, earning the nickname, “the Mississippi of the West,”2 from George Stevens, former Chairman of San Diego’s Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and San Diego National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) president, and Dr. Carrol W. Waymon, founder of the San Diego State College Black History Department (today’s Africana Studies Department) and former Executive Director of San Diego’s Citizen’s Interracial Committee (CIC).3 In 1964, African-Americans in San Diego were routinely turned down for loans from banks, denied housing outside of three segregated neighborhoods,4 unable to work at companies like San Diego Gas & Electric or Woolworth’s, and refused entrance to many businesses solely because of the color of their skin. They were even prohibited from trying on clothes at department stores. King’s brief trip to California in 1964 was rife with conflict. As he flew west, his cottage in Florida was attacked by armed gunmen; during his talks in San Diego, protestors handed out fliers on site declaring that King was a communist;5 and a few weeks after he returned home, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover told reporters that King was “the most notorious liar in the country.”6 King faced adversity nearly everywhere he went, and San Diego was neither an exception nor a respite from near constant antagonism.
Political Background
By the late 1950s, the Democratic Party in California had largely become the state’s civil rights party. In 1958, California democrats swept the legislative elections, including a victory by democrat Edmund G. “Pat” Brown in the gubernatorial race. Together, these wins gave democrats a super-majority of over two-thirds in the state legislature, making it impossible for anti-civil rights members to block legislation. Governor Brown and the state assembly immediately made civil rights their primary agenda. By the end of 1959, they succeeded in passing the Fair Employment Protection Act (FEPA), the Unruh Civil Rights Act, and the Hawkins Act.7 Governor Brown’s momentum carried into the 1960s as he defeated big-name Republican Richard Nixon in the 1962 election.8 As the civil rights movement gained speed and escalated across the country, California activists successfully pushed for additional progressive reform in the state. For example, University of California, Berkeley, students participated in peaceful
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demonstrations against national companies that complied with Jim Crow laws or refused to hire African-Americans. In January 1963, the Berkeley City Council passed the first fair-housing ordinance in California, although this ordinance was soon after repealed in April.9 On April 25, 1963, the California state assembly passed the California Fair Housing Act.10 The Rumford Act, as it was more commonly known, was introduced by William Byron Rumford, a civil rights activist and the first African-American from Northern California to serve in the state legislature. This act prohibited discrimination by realtors and property owners on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or ancestry. Discrimination against blacks and others in the housing market contributed to the growth of large concentrations of minority groups in urban areas where they often lived in unhealthy, overcrowded, and impoverished conditions. King and others knew that housing discrimination, especially in northern and western parts of the country, was a starting point for addressing broader racist practices in America; they insisted that weakening this sort of structural bigotry would successfully undermine other forms of institutionalized racism. Their cause gained momentum as the passage of the Rumford Act in California was followed by many other states passing similar anti-discriminatory civil-rights legislation at this time. Public backlash against the Rumford Act among certain stakeholders in the state was swift. California’s Chamber of Commerce and the construction and real estate industries immediately met the law with great protest. In fact, it was at the El Cortez Hotel in San Diego on January 11, 1964, that real estate agents met to determine if the California Real Estate Association (CREA) would sponsor the proposed Proposition 14, an initiative action that would overturn the Rumford Act.11 It sought to add an amendment to the constitution of California prohibiting state action that would hinder any person from discriminating when selling or renting a property. Protesters, many of whom were San Diego members of the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), gathered to show their opposition for the initiative with signs that read “The Ghetto Must Go,” “Human Rights over Property Rights,” and “Housing Discrimination Must End.” Counter-protestors showed up to support Proposition 14, including members of the American Nazi Party, who carried signs stating, “The Rumford Act is Communist Backed; Treason is the Reason.” By the meeting’s end, over 1,000 directors from CREA statewide reaffirmed the racist agenda to sponsor and support the passage of Proposition 14, disguising it as an issue of state’s rights.12 Not only did it sponsor Proposition 14, CREA funneled over $100,000 in campaign funds and extensive propaganda to ensure its victory. Proposition. 14 would be decided upon by the voters in California’s 1964 election.13
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Those rallying to uphold the Rumford Act recognized that California’s fair housing law might not survive the November 1964 election. In fact, there was a prominent counter-trend of fair-housing laws being rejected nationwide by popular referendum in 1964 and 1965.14 As a result, numerous organizations collaborated to invite and sponsor a set of California appearances by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His busy itinerary would include speaking with the public on the specific importance of defeating Proposition 14 and uniting this regional cause with the general significance of combatting all future legislation that impeded the desegregation of the nation.15 King’s brief trip to California included stops in San Diego, Los Angeles, Fresno, and San Francisco with two talks scheduled at local colleges. Sponsors for these two San Diego addresses, including the San Diego State College Lectures and Concerts Board, Western Christian Leadership Conference, San Diego County Council of Churches, San Diego Ministerial Association, Associated Student Body of California Western University, and United Church Women of San Diego, hoped that King’s presence would galvanize opposition to Proposition 14 and further national causes to end lawful segregation in all of its institutionalized forms.
Martin Luther King in San Diego
There are historical discrepancies regarding the number of trips King made to San Diego and his exact itineraries during these visits. Although many local contemporaneous leaders claimed that he made only one or two trips to the city, oral histories and a spotty trail of artifacts suggest that there were three separate appearances. San Diego native, San Diego State College alumnus (Class of 1965), and famed local educator Willie Jefferson Horton, Jr. stated that he first met King in 1955 when the burgeoning civil rights leader first came to San Diego to visit Bethel Baptist Church pastor Charles H. Hampton. Hampton was a personal friend of King’s father, the Baptist minister Martin Luther King.16 A sixth grader at the time, Horton clearly recalled his mother telling him: “Finish your homework; let’s go. This is history in the making!”17 Horton also remembered that King came to town in an effort to raise money for the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which was fueled by the December 1, 1955, arrest of Rosa Parks.18 King also visited San Diego five years later on February 26, 1960; on this trip he spoke at two local churches, Bethel Baptist Church and Calvary Baptist Church. Voice & Viewpoint reporter Chida Warren-Darby, insisted that this was Dr. King’s first appearance in San Diego, an assertion that Horton vehemently denies.19 There is little doubt about King’s 1960 visit, as multiple people, including former CORE leader and San Diego County Urban League administrator Ambrose
378 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s final visit to San Diego
Brodus, Jr., detailed extensive personal interaction with the famed civil rights leader. Brodus recalled that he met Dr. King at Calvary Baptist Church in 1960 and emphasized how the meeting changed his life, stating that, “The man believed. Dr. King practiced what he preached, and we could see that he was determined.”20 It is difficult to dispute his account as Brodus kept his autographed program from King’s 1960 San Diego appearance. King returned four years later to San Diego on May 29, 1964; he arrived on a PSA “super-electric” jet that landed at Lindbergh Field. King was scheduled for two official in-town speaking engagements; one at San Diego State College (SDSC), now San Diego State Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. autographed this University (SDSU), and a second at program for Ambrose Brodus, Jr. At the time of his San Diego appearance, King was facing trial for California Western University (Cal tax evasion in Alabama. An all-white jury would Western), now Point Loma Nazarene acquit him on May 28, 1960. Author’s collection. University (PLNU). Nevertheless, there is debate as to the exact events of the day. Hartwell W. Ragsdale, former president of the San Diego NAACP and prominent local businessman (owner of the Anderson Ragsdale Mortuary), recalled that he ordered a limousine to pick up King at the airport. He explained that, “Having Dr. King here had meaning to me. It was the greatest thing associated with my life.”21 In Ragsdale’s account, the hired car then drove King to the NAACP branch headquarters at 2601 Imperial Avenue in San Diego to meet with Ragsdale and other staff members. Once there, the group discussed legislative efforts to end segregation in California and the rest of the nation. Following this meeting, Ragsdale stated that King was then escorted by NAACP members to his multiple speaking engagements and, later, driven back to Lindbergh Field to continue his speaking tour of California. Ragsdale’s son, Hartwell “Skipper” Ragsdale III, was nine years old during the visit and recalled that King “was very warm…very genuine [and] seemed to be very caring and sincere…. He spoke to me as though I was someone he was very familiar with.”22 The younger Ragsdale was also quoted as saying that, “I remember riding around in the car with [King] and watching
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him. He was just an everyday regular person. Even though he was revered, he was so kind.”23 Warren-Darby’s Voice and Viewpoint article included a photograph of King with Ragsdale. Mary Eunice Oliver, a local civil rights activist and member of the Episcopal Human Relations Commission, provided different Mary Eunice Oliver (left) looks on in delight as Dr. information about King’s 1964 visit to King (center) shakes hands with her son, Darrel Oliver (right). Photograph courtesy of Darrel San Diego. She stated that her church Oliver. was honored with the responsibility of attending to King during his brief visit. Oliver recalled personally escorting him from Lindbergh Field and bringing him directly from the airport to SDSC for his 2:00 p.m. speech. She also has a photograph featuring King, herself, and others at Lindbergh Field (Figures 2 and 3). Furthermore, the King Center Archive in Atlanta, Georgia, contains two correspondences confirming Oliver’s time with King; the first even mentions the Lindbergh Field pictures. Mary Eunice Oliver handwrote a letter to King on June 22, 1964, which stated:
Dear Dr. King, Dr. Martin Luther King (center) shakes hands with an admirer. Photograph courtesy of Darrel Oliver.
Due to your sacrificial witness in St. Augustine, it may be a long time before this letter will be read, yet I must write and express my gratitude for your efforts in San Diego. We felt the total program was terrific, thanks to you, and your wonderful Christian witness. God has richly blessed you with many talents, especially the peace that passes understanding, which is highlighted in everything you do, and say and are.
The pictures we took at the airport are fine. Will send you copies shortly. God bless and protect you.
Faithfully,
Mary Eunice
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King responded with a typed correspondence on June 29, 1964, that read:
Dear Mrs. Oliver,
This is a rather belated note thanking you and your husband for making my recent visit to San Diego such a magnificent one. I am deeply grateful to both of you for all of the courtesies extended. The fellowship was rich indeed, and I only regret that we did not have more time together.
Please extend my warm best wishes to all of the friends I had an opportunity to meet in San Diego, particularly to your lovely children. I do hope our paths will cross again in the not too distant future. May God continue to bless you and yours in all of your endeavors.
Sincerely yours,
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Overall, it is difficult to reconcile Ragsdale and Oliver’s conflicting narratives as they recount seemingly mutually exclusive events. Both renditions could be seen as accurate, however, if the Ragsdales’ memories refer to King’s 1960 visit.24 The Atlanta archive also has King’s May 20, 1964, welcome letter from San Diego Board of Supervisors’ Chairman, Robert C. Dent. The tone of the correspondence was surprisingly devotional given that it came from a public administrator; it stated: Dear Doctor King:
As Chairman of the Board of Supervisors of the County of San Diego, it is my pleasure to welcome you to our County.
As you are probably aware, Southern California is one of the fastest growing areas in the United States. With a continual increase in our work and problems, those of us in local government must constantly work toward the improvement of our services to the public with fairness and equity to all people.
Without the Christian influence, our labors would be in vain. We are all cognizant of the necessity of applying Christian principles to attain success in all our endeavors. We are particularly indebted
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to leaders like you who are devoting their lives to make our world a better place in which to live.
There is much work to be done but it is my belief if we all keep in mind the Christian truths upon which this Nation is founded and our responsibilities to all people as we go about our daily tasks, we can all go forward in harmony.
Sincerely,
Robert C. Dent
Almost as soon as King deplaned at Lindbergh Field in 1964, San Diego State College journalism professor Harold Keen interviewed him for local CBS affiliate, Channel 8. Video footage of this conversation, long thought to have been lost or destroyed, was recently discovered by KFMB producer David Gotfredson in the spring of 2014. The interview revealed dramatic details of the recent attack on King’s cottage in St. Augustine, Florida. This southern city had been at the epicenter of racial conflict for generations, and in 1964 was about to explode into widespread violence for the nation to see on television and in newspapers. St. Augustine had an especially active Ku Klux Klan (KKK) chapter and a militant NAACP leader in Dr. Robert B. Hayling, a former U.S. Air Force officer. In the spring of 1964, Hayling encouraged northern college students in St. Augustine to join in local anti-segregation social activism instead of vacationing at the beach
These long-lost KFMB film reels contain the only existing footage of Professor Keen’s interview with Dr. King and a few glimpses of King’s address at the Greek Bowl. Photograph courtesy of David Gotfredson.
382 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s final visit to San Diego
during their school break. King and other members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) joined the cause and engaged in months of non- violent protest, resulting in numerous arrests and rampant physical abuse of activists by segregationists.25 Keen’s poignant interview with a clearly disturbed yet defiant King, missing for 50 years and presumed lost, is reproduced here in its entirety. Keen’s questions are tough, common to 1960s journalism, and King’s answers are remarkably raw assessments of civil rights struggle, especially in his stern critique of people who had yet to take a side in this conflict.
May 29, 1964 Interview
Professor Keen: Dr. King, your rented cottage in St. Augustine in Florida was hit by bullets early today. Does this indicate a new outbreak of violence in the civil rights struggle?
Dr. King: Well, it does indicate that there are still recalcitrant forces alive in the South that will do anything to prevent integration. We started a strong push to desegregate facilities in that the oldest city in the United States just last Wednesday and this is a result of the violent reaction to that move. The Klan is rather strong in that area and very active, and I think this is the beginning of a reign of terror, and I have apprised President Johnson of this through a telegram that I just sent stating that several acts of terror have taken place. Some of my staff members were beaten last night. They shot in their automobiles, and then went and shot in the cottage that I had just rented for our staff for the months that we would be working there. So I think it is a critical problem and one that should call, bring about action from the federal government.
Professor Keen: Dr. King, have some of the unpopular civil disobedience tactics and disorders such as the New York World’s Fair stall-in26 indicated that responsible Negro leadership may have lost control?
Dr. King: No, I don’t think at all. I think we still have the vast majority of Negroes following the lines or the methods set forth by the established organizations and the responsible leaders. I think this will continues as long as we make progress, as long as we can win concrete victories, but I must say that if these victories do not
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come through non-violence and if the vast majority of Negroes are not able to see definite gains, these other approaches may appeal to them more in future months.
Professor Keen: You believe there’s a possibility of serious bloodshed then if this frustration is not overcome?
Dr. King: Well, I hate to predict violence because I found in so many instances that the constant prediction of violence is an unconscious invitation to it, but I must be realistic. If there is not a strong move to do something about the injustices the Negroes face, if there isn’t something dramatic done, if the Civil Rights Bill does not pass with strength, I’m sure that it will show increase the discontent, the restlessness, the frustration, and the despair of the Negro that it will be much more difficult to keep the struggle disciplined and non-violent.
Professor Keen: Don’t the strong showings of Governor Wallace in the primaries27 in which he was entered show a public reaction against the civil rights movement?
Dr. King: I think this is a reaction from many people who have never been committed to civil rights. I don’t think it means a setback or what some refer to as a white backlash. The fact is that many of these people have been out in the middle all along, neither pro- or anti-. Now they’re forced to face the issue in a way that they’ve never faced it before, and they find that they have many more latent prejudices, than they realize. I think the other thing in the Wallace showing that we just see is that prejudice is not just a sectional problem. It’s a national problem, and I think it may be a blessing in disguise in that it will cause people of good will to realize that much more must be done to get rid of this festering sore of segregation.
Professor Keen: How do you rate the Republican candidates in California on the issue of civil rights, Governor Rockefeller and Senator Goldwater?28
Dr. King: Now Governor Rockefeller has made it clear to the national public, and he’s made it clear to me in private conversations
384 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s final visit to San Diego
that I’ve had with him that he’s committed to civil rights in general and to the Civil Rights Bill in particular. He has advanced broad humanitarian concern and the Rockefeller family generally has given support to civil rights. Now Mr. Goldwater has also made his position clear. He feels that the matter of civil rights should be left to the states, and this means that you leave it to Mr. Wallace of Alabama and to Barnetts29 and Johnsons of Mississippi, and I just don’t think this matter can be left in the hands of such racists. So I don’t think Senator Goldwater can be considered a strong man in civil rights.
Professor Keen: What influence do you think the Negro vote will have in the presidential election this year?
Dr. King: I think we’ll have great influence. The Negro vote is still the balance of power in your main urban areas, your large communities and large electoral states of our country, and I think the Negro vote may well determine the next president of the United States.
Professor Keen: Is there any possibility that you yourself might enter politics following your own advice that Negros should be more active in this field?
Dr. King: Well, I haven’t considered this at this point. I do think it is necessary for Negros to become more political minded and for more persons of integrity and depth of understanding, and I think it’s necessary for them to enter politics, but at this point, I feel that my job is in the civil rights struggle and one that should stay above both political parties and not become inextricably bound to either.
Dr. King’s speech at SDSC began at 2:00 p.m. on a Friday afternoon at the Greek Bowl.30 The speech was well attended; over 4,000 students, faculty, and community members listened to the address. Multiple local newspapers previewed the speech, claiming that this was San Diego’s opportunity to hear from the man who “will not be satisfied until segregation is dead in America” and who was touring California to “mobilize the liberal forces to push passage of the pending civil rights legislation without crippling amendments.”31 San Diego State Associated Students President Jerry Harmon served as the event’s master of ceremonies. Although King’s address from the event has since been lost, interviews with attendees and newspaper accounts of the event offer snippets of what was said. The most
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The following caption was run with this May 30, 1964, San Diego Union photograph: “The Rev. Martin Luther King tells San Diego State students in Greek theater that racial discrimination in California should make them as indignant as bombing of Negro churches in South. King later took campaign for civil rights legislation to audience at California Western University.” The original newspaper photograph has disappeared from the San Diego Union-Tribune archives; all that remains is this low-resolution scan.
complete account of the address came from the June 2, 1964, Daily Aztec. Buried on page 9 of the campus newspaper with no accompanying picture, an article by student reporter Cathy Pearson talked about how King outlined a “three-point program” to make the American dream a reality for all citizens.32 According to Pearson, King’s first point concerned universal peace; he told the San Diego State crowd that, “If the American dream is to become a reality, it must be concerned with the world dream… Now man’s moral and ethical commitment must make the world one in terms of brotherhood and peace.” King underscored that, “We must learn to live together as brothers or we will perish together as fools.”33 His next point dispelled the notion of superior and inferior races, debunking a wide variety of self-serving segregationist arguments. King explained that, “We can’t use the tragic results of segregation as an argument for its continuation.” His final point was a plea for the U.S. to actively eliminate the final remnants of segregation; King was especially vehement in his dismissal of certain well- propagated myths—e.g., “Only time can solve the problem” and “Legislation cannot solve the problem of civil rights”—that placated and ensured maintenance of a bigoted status-quo. He matter-of-factly observed that:
You can’t legislate integration, but you can legislate de-segregation. Morality can’t be legislated, but laws can regulate behavior. Laws can’t
386 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s final visit to San Diego
make you love me, but they can keep you from lynching me. The law can change our habits, and then our hearts will change.
In addition to detailing this tri-partite plan of action, Dr. King also spoke directly to two pressing legislative matters: 1) the need to pass the federal civil rights act that then sat before Congress (The Civil Rights Act of 1964), and 2) the need to defeat the initiative that would nullify California civil rights statutes (Proposition 14). He urged those in attendance to vote against Proposition 14, concluding that it “would be a setback for American freedom and the entire structure of justice if the Rumford Act in California were repealed.” King’s speech at the near-capacity Greek Bowl left a lasting impression on many who attended. Multiple alumni who were there recalled the audience being composed and silent when King started. That quiet attentiveness soon shifted to inspired excitement as the civil rights leader delivered his powerful message. Mary Cook, who attended the speech with her communications class, recalled being “blown away” by King. She insisted, “We had been studying and listening to many great speeches, but what I remember best about his speech was his passion.”34 The content of King’s address This still-photograph of Dr. King speaking at the Greek Bowl was also stunned Cook; she pulled from KFMB’s rediscovered video. Ralph Clem noted the almost professorial air of Dr. King as he leaned on his podium during the San remarked that growing Diego State address. Photograph courtesy of David Gotfredson. up in East County, the plight of many African- Americans living in San Diego was unbeknownst to her. It was only after listening to King that she realized how few African-Americans were in attendance at SDSC. Likewise, class of 1964 alumnus James Sibbet’s lasting memory of the event was of how dynamically King spoke, noting that “I was truly impressed.”35 Viola Cox, now 97, attended the speech and recalled that, “It was very exciting… I remember the young people jumping up and down saying, ‘What a speaker!’ ‘What a speaker!’”36 Ralph Clem (San Diego State College Class of 1965), now a retired U.S. Air Force general and professor emeritus of International Relations at Florida International University, also witnessed the event. He reminisced that, “It was
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clear that [King] was a great orator,” but emphasized that this address was “more of a lecture than it was a speech…I don’t remember it as rousing. I remember it as very impressive.”37 Clem explained that, “He talked a lot about the institutional basis of the civil rights movement, about the need for legal reforms, the needs for members of minority groups…to have access to In another still from Channel 8’s footage, Dr. King is pictured signing an autograph for a SDSC the full range of rights that any citizen student. Photograph courtesy of David Gotfredson. should expect in this country and how that might be pursued.” It was as if Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., holder of a Ph.D. in systematic theology and policy expert, was speaking to the crowd instead of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., the devout and inspirational leader of the Civil Rights movement. People who attended both San Diego speeches in 1964 noted by comparison that King’s Cal Western address later that day was less intellectual and more emotional. Ethnic diversity at SDSC at the time of King’s visit was minimal. According to the San Diego State College yearbook, Del Sudoeste, from 1964, fewer than a dozen graduating seniors were African-American, despite the fact that black students had been attending the institution for over half a century.38 Willie Horton saw firsthand the hostile environment many African-Americans faced across the country as they sought a higher-education degree. Reminiscing on his experience as an SDSC student, Horton said that certain faculty would purposefully give African-American students failing marks in courses to force them out of the college regardless of the quality of the work. Horton, who attended both of King’s 1964 speeches in San Diego, was especially motivated by the addresses. He recalled that King had an unrivaled ability to “move people to action,” calling him “an effective motivator for students and others in the crowd.” Although King’s San Diego State speech may not have immediately pushed administrators and faculty to create an equal-opportunity campus, Horton believed that his appearance at SDSC enlightened many students to the plight of African-Americans locally and across the nation. Likewise, Clem noted that the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) had been granted student-group status on campus only two days before King’s visit in 1964, and that student awareness of the civil rights movement was “really starting to pick up speed at that time.”39 Immediately following the conclusion of his speech at the Greek Bowl, King signed a small number of autographs and was quickly led away to a waiting
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vehicle.40 His activities after the delivery of his speech at SDSC and prior to his appearance at Cal Western are not well documented. Reports suggest that King and his entourage, which included close associate and fellow SCLC leader Dr. Ralph Abernathy, were taken on a tour of San Diego. This included a short sail on Mission Bay and a scenic drive through San Diego with stops at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery and Mount Soledad.41 King’s speaking engagement at Cal Western began at 8:00 p.m. in the Golden Gymnasium. Between 3,500 to 5,000 students, faculty, religious groups, and city dignitaries attended the event, which opened with an official welcome to the university by members of the six sponsoring groups responsible for his visit. King’s speech was entitled “Remaining Awake through a Great Revolution.” Like the address earlier in the day at San Diego State, the content centered on the elimination of all forms of segregation and targeted particular importance to California voters rejecting Proposition 14. He spoke slowly and with purpose, to what he called “a beautiful, integrated audience,”42 and was interrupted over twenty times by enthusiastic applause. In his speech, King described the attack on his St. Augustine cottage only hours before his arrival in San Diego, emphasizing, “We work under these conditions all along and yet we do it without fear.” King thrilled his audience, covering four central points—1) reaffirming the essential immorality of racial segregation, 2) rejecting the notion of superior and inferior races, 3) insisting that the struggle for equality be non-violent, and 4) explaining that this was a national problem. He used the story of Rip Van Winkle sleeping through the American Revolution as a parable for how to keep all Americans awake during the current social revolution. In closing, Dr. King urged those in attendance to “[s]tand up for justice, not next week, not even tomorrow, not even a[n] hour from now, but at this moment.” Similar to the recollections of those who witnessed King’s speech at San Diego State, those in attendance at Cal Western were moved by King’s passion and the urgency with which he spoke. Darrel Oliver was nine years old when he heard King speak at the Golden Gymnasium. He recalled that, “The place was electric. There was a feeling of solidarity between us.”43 Additional interviews echo Oliver’s sentiments; many remarked that they recalled the sensation of being a part of something momentous. Whether King left immediately following his speech at Cal Western for the airport is not certain. Reports indicated that King and his colleagues only intended to stay in San Diego for ten hours.44 It is believed that King either received a ride back to Lindbergh Field following his speech or that he stayed in San Diego overnight and left from the airport the following day. The Olivers recalled that there were discussions about King altering his travel plans in an effort to thwart
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planned attacks, especially considering the events that had just transpired in Florida.45
Material Legacies
Despite King’s iconic stature, the profundity of his message, and the importance of the times in which he spoke in San Diego, the region’s historical archives contained remarkably little evidence of his 1964 appearance. San Diego State‘s records were especially sparse, leading multiple local administrators, politicians, and dignitaries to suggest that King never even visited the campus. This dearth of material was especially surprising and troubling when compared to the extensive collection the SDSU library from U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 visit to campus, including audio, video, dozens of photos, programs, seating charts, transcribed oral histories, extensive contemporaneous media coverage, commemorative markers, and statuary. It is suggested here that the lack of memorabilia collection, preservation, and celebration was a continuation of San Diego’s spotty record on civil rights. How else could so little remain from an event in which the famed “Man of the Year” spoke to a capacity crowd on the eve of the most important legislation of the 20th century? SDSU Special Collections has only three items relating to King’s 1964 appearance: a public announcement request, and two separate invitations to speak in 1965 and 1966. The P. A. spot request revealed that the announcement, “This Friday Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. will address the students and Faculty of San Diego State College. The place – Greek Bowl. The time – 2:00 p.m.,” was read multiple times from May 27-29. The university’s archive also contained evidence showing that although King never returned to San Diego after 1964, SDSC continued to send invitations for him to speak during the 1965 academic year and the 1966 summer session. In his 1965 reply, King alluded to the state of the struggle for civil rights across the country and declined the invitation, citing his newly adopted policy of not accepting speaking engagements more than three months in advance to avoid the potential embarrassment of having to cancel. In 1966, King wrote of his increasingly demanding schedule working with voter-rights’ groups in Chicago, conducting workshops on non-violence, and his increased focus on grassroots movements across the nation as his reason for declining a return visit to San Diego State. In 2007, Point Loma Nazarene University (formerly Cal Western) honored King’s memory by dedicating a podium-shaped kiosk, replicating the one used during his speech. The interactive memorial, funded by the PLNU Alumni Association, allowed visitors to listen to portions of his speech, read a timeline of Dr. King’s
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accomplishments, and view multiple photographs. For the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s speech in 2014, the podium was rededicated. In an effort to address and start correcting the institution’s longstanding oversight of King’s visit to campus, San Diego State University officials celebrated the golden anniversary of this historic event with a large ceremony that included hundreds of students, faculty, administrators, alumni, and community members. The public gala featured the dedication of a permanent plaque (the largest of its kind on campus), sponsored by California Coast Credit Union, SDSU Associated Students, and the SDSU Alumni Association, and placed prominently at the east entrance of what was once the Greek Bowl—today’s California Coast Credit Union Amphitheatre. The marker included a brief history of King’s visit and highlighted the excerpt from his speech: “We must learn to live together as brothers or we will perish together as fools.” The ceremony included speeches by SDSU President Elliot Hirshman, SDSU Anthropology chair Seth Mallios, aforementioned SDSC alumnus Willie J. Horton, Jr., student-essay contest winners Jessica Ahern, Mary Stout-Clipper, and Thomas De La Garza, and a rousing from-memory rendition of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech by local nine-year-old Jeremiah Carr.
Conclusions
The legacies of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1964 visit to San Diego are remarkably varied. Months after he left the city, Proposition 14 passed by a near two-thirds majority, seemingly marking the end of the state’s Fair Housing Act.46 In 1966, however, the California Supreme Court would strike down the proposition as unconstitutional. A year later, the U.S. Supreme Court would uphold this decision in Reitman v. Mulkey on the grounds that a state court could invalidate a state’s constitutional amendment if the amendment violated the U.S. Constitution, in this case, the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Simply put, King was decidedly unsuccessful in his attempts at convincing West Coast voters to defeat Proposition 14, but state and federal courts would rescue the Rumford Act. Furthermore, King’s setback in the Golden State was offset by landmark national gains, first and foremost being the Civil Rights Act in 1964, passed about a month after his San Diego appearance.47 In addition, those groups that were actively protesting racial discrimination in the region before King’s local collegiate tour in 1964, including CORE and may others, continued to gain momentum in demonstrations against bigoted employment practices in San Diego. Moreover, SDSU’s institutional amnesia of King’s historic visit has finally been at least partially addressed by the anniversary celebration and a prominent and permanent public plaque that will prevent
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Photographers took a variety of images from King’s Cal Western appearance. ©SDHC UT #85: D9216-11 (Marti#149309D).
anyone on campus from ever wondering again, “Did MLK really visit State?” Lastly, the authors of this article insist on preserving King’s Cal Western speech here in its entirety for multiple reasons. Not only did the address come at one of the most important times in the nation’s history and contain a powerful message of peace and equality in the face of violence and hate, but it also was nearly lost from the permanent historical record. In fact, the San Diego State speech is apparently gone, and the Cal Western address has been accidentally misplaced multiple times.48 With its reproduction here, King’s words in his final address in San Diego will never be lost again. “Remaining Awake through a Great Revolution,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s California Western University Speech.49
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Ladies and gentlemen:
I need not pause to say how very delighted I am to have the opportunity of coming once more to the city of San Diego, California, and the opportunity of being a part of this meeting. It is always a rich and rewarding experience when I can take a brief break from the day to day and hour to hour demands of our struggle in the South, and discuss the issues involved in that struggle with concerned people all over this nation and all over the world. And I want to express my deep personal appreciation to all of the sponsoring groups this evening for making this magnificent meeting possible. I say this magnificent meeting because you have turned out in such large numbers, and I am sure that your presence here tonight is indicative of your support and your concern in the area of civil rights. Certainly we need that support in this hour and at this period in our nation’s history. And I can assure you that I am deeply inspired as I look out into your faces and as I notice this beautiful integrated audience. It gives me deep joy within. I wish you could see yourselves and look how beautiful you look. And somehow this is what mankind should be and how mankind should look one day in our nation all over this vast land. We will come to see integration not as a problem, but as an opportunity to participate in the beauty of diversity. And so it is great and noble to have the privilege of being here tonight and I bring greetings to you from all of the members, all of the officers, and all of the staff members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference who are working all over the Southland to make justice and freedom a reality in that section of the country.
We have our difficult moments as you well know. In fact I just talked with some of our staff members who are now in St. Augustine, Florida. Four of us who are here tonight just left there a few hours ago, and not long after we left they shot in the house some fifteen times where we were staying. They thought we were there, I guess, last night. Fortunately, nobody was in the house, because if we had been there somebody may have faced physical death. We work under these conditions all along and yet we do it without fear. We do it with a determination to go on because the destiny of our nation is involved and we are struggling not merely to free twenty million Negroes but we are struggling to free the soul of our nation. (APPLAUSE)
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I am so happy that the religious forces of this community and of this state have participated in such a meaningful way by serving as a sponsoring organization for this particular meeting and the other meetings that I will be addressing in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Fresno before returning to the South. It is good to see this because as you know this problem is a moral problem. And the religious institutions, being the moral guardians of the community, must certainly take a great responsibility in making brotherhood a reality.
This evening I would like to discuss some of the problems that we still face in our nation in the area of race relations and reiterate some of the things that I said earlier in the afternoon at San Diego State College by using as a subject from which to speak “Remaining Awake through a Great Revolution.” Many of you have probably read that arresting little story by Washington Irving entitled “Rip Van Winkle.” The thing that we usually remember about Rip Van Winkle is that he slept twenty years. But there is another point in that story that is almost always completely overlooked. It was a sign on the Inn in the little town on the Hudson in which Rip went up into the mountain for his long sleep. When he went up the sign had a picture of King George the Third of England. And when he came down the sign had a picture of George Washington, the first President of the United States. And when Rip looked up at the picture of George Washington he was amazed. He was completely lost. He knew not who he was. This incident reveals to us that the most striking thing about the story of Rip Van Winkle is not merely that he slept twenty years, but that he slept through a revolution. While he was peacefully snoring up in the mountain, a great revolution was taking place in the world; a revolution that at many points would change the course of history. And yet, Rip Van Winkle knew nothing about it. He was asleep. One of the great liabilities of history is that all too many people find themselves amid great periods of social change and yet they fail to achieve the new mental outlook, and the new attitudes, that the new situation demands. All too many people find themselves sleeping through a revolution. And I am convinced that there is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution. There can be no gainsaying of the fact that a revolution has taken place in the world and in our nation and is sweeping away an old unjust order and bringing into being a new creative order. The great challenge facing every man and every woman today is to remain awake through this great social revolution.
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Martin Luther King, Jr. (center) after giving speech at Cal Western University. ©SDHC #UT 85: D9216-4 (Martin#14933F2).
Now I would like to suggest some of the things that we must do here in America if we are to remain awake through this revolution. First I would like to say that we must reaffirm the essential immorality of racial segregation. Whether it is the legal de jure segregation of the South or whether it is the de facto segregation of the North, we must come to see that segregation is morally wrong and sinful. It is not only politically unsound. It is not only sociologically untenable, but segregation is morally wrong and sinful. Segregation is wrong because it is nothing but a new form of slavery covered up with certain niceties of complexity. Segregation is a cancer in the body politic which must be removed before our moral health can be realized. And I have come to see this over and over again in so many instances.
I remember not too long ago that Mrs. King and I had the privilege of journeying to that great country known as India. As we traveled all over the country hundreds and thousands of people followed us, everywhere we went, not so much because we had anything unique to say, but because we were Negroes in the United States (from the United States, rather), and they wanted to hear about the race problem. I never will forget one afternoon we journeyed to the southernmost part of India, the state of Kerala, the city of Trivandrum. And I was to speak
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that afternoon in a school that was attended largely by students whose parents were considered untouchables. Now in India the problem of cast untouchability is similar to the problem that we face in race relations in the whole area of segregation. Untouchables for years were considered inferior and they could not use certain public facilities. They could not go into the temples. They were considered outcasts. And that afternoon as I entered into the auditorium to make my speech, the principal introduced me. And after he said several things he finally said to the students, I would now like introduce to you a fellow untouchable from the United States of America. (APPLAUSE)
For the moment I was a bit peeved and shocked that I would be referred to as an untouchable. In that moment my mind leaped back across the mighty Atlantic and I started thinking about the fact that in Montgomery, Alabama, where I was living at that time, I could not go to any restaurant that white people had the privilege of going to. I could not go to a lunch counter and get hamburger or a cup of coffee. I started thinking about the fact that even if I wanted to gain the great insights of the ages, in going to the public library; I couldn’t go because it was for whites only. I started thinking about the fact that I could not go to a single public park in Montgomery, Alabama, because all of the parks were closed as a result of a court order calling for integration of recreational facilities. And I started thinking about the fact that my little daughter and other children that would be born in our family, would be raising nagging questions, “Why is it that we can’t go here? Why is it that we can’t go there?” And so deep down within I had to say to myself, “I am an untouchable and every Negro born in the United States is an untouchable.” And this is evil. (APPLAUSE) And this is the evilness of segregation. It stigmatizes the segregated as an untouchable in a cast system. And so we must reaffirm the essential immorality of this system and we must make it clear all over the nation that segregation must go and that we are through with segregation now, henceforth, and forevermore. (APPLAUSE)
Now the second thing that I would like to mention deals with a problem that we still find. It is in the ideological realm. It is the idea that there are superior and inferior races. We are challenged more than ever before to get rid of the notion that there are superior and inferior races. But anybody who believes this is sleeping through a revolution.
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(APPLAUSE) Now, certainly we don’t need to sleep at this point. Great intellectual disciplines have pointed out that there is no truth in this. Great anthropologists like Ruth Benedict, Margaret Meade, the late Melville Herskovits and others, have made it clear over and over again that, as a result of their long years of study, they have found no evidence for this idea of superior and inferior races. There may be superior and inferior individuals within all racial groups, but there are no superior and inferior races. And yet in spite of this, many people still go along believing in this false notion. I was appalled to see as a result of a survey by Newsweek magazine a few months ago, the percentage of the white persons of this nation who believe that Negroes are inherently and biologically inferior. These people are sleeping through a revolution. Now there was a time that people used to try to justify the inferiority of the Negro on the basis of religion and the Bible. It’s tragic indeed how people will use religion, I should say misuse religion and the Bible, to justify their prejudices. And so it was argued that the Negro was inferior by nature, because of Noah’s curse upon the children of Ham. The Apostle Paul’s dictum became a watchword, “Servants, be obedient to your master.” And then one brother had probably read the logic of the great philosopher Aristotle. Aristotle was a philosopher who lived in the heyday of Greek culture. And he did a great deal to bring into being what we now know in philosophy as formal logic. And formal logic has a big word known as a “syllogism.” A syllogism has a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion. And so this brother decided to put his argument of the inferiority of the Negro in the framework of an Aristotelian syllogism. He could say as his major premise “All men are made in the image of God.”
Then came his minor premise, “God, as everybody knows, is not a Negro. Therefore, the Negro is not a man.” This was a kind of reason. But on the whole we’ve gotten away from these arguments. Now not all together because I read the other day that a brother down in Mississippi said that God was a charter member of the White Citizens Council. But there seriously, we’ve gotten away from many of these arguments now and arguments are now on subtle sociological, cultural grounds. “The Negro is not culturally ready for integration.” You’ve heard these arguments. If you integrate the schools and neighborhoods this will pull the white race back a generation. And you see the Negro as a criminal. These arguments go on ad infinitum. And individuals who set forth
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such arguments never go on to say that if there are lagging standards in the Negro community, and there certainly are, they lag because of segregation and discrimination. Poverty, ignorance, social isolation, economic deprivation breed crime whatever the racial group may be. And it is a tortuous logic to use the tragic results of segregation as an argument for the continuation of it. (APPLAUSE) It is necessary to go back to the cause of it. And so it is necessary to get rid of this notion once and for all.
Now if you would allow me I would like to say just a word to those of us who have been on the oppressed end of the old order. We’ve lived with the system so long. And when one lives with an evil unjust system so long, that is always a danger. That system generates a feeling of inferiority. And I think this is one of ultimate evils of segregation. Not merely what it does to one in terms of physical inconvenience, but what it does to one’s psychological makeup. And so it so often leaves the segregated with a nagging feeling of inferiority. And so many of us face that, and so many of us face it as a result of the long night of slavery and segregation. And I would like to say that in spite of this, we must work hard now to achieve excellence in our various fields of endeavor. I know the dilemma. Here we are now caught in a situation in history where we have been the victims of 344 years of slavery and segregation. And now the forces of history are saying that we must be as productive and as resourceful as individuals who have not known such oppression. This is a difficult problem. It is a real dilemma. For he who gets behind in the race must forever remain behind, or run faster than the man in front. This is the dilemma which the Negro faces in this nation today, and it is a real one. And so that means that we’ve got to work hard. We’ve got to study hard. We’ve got to go out of the way to gain new skills. We’ve got to go out of the way to burn the midnight oil. We’ve got to go out of the way to keep from dropping out of school. And I know the reasons why all of these things are done. But after we go through this sociological analysis, then we must get to the point that we are willing to work with determination to achieve excellence in our fields of endeavor. The doors are opening now that were not open to our mothers and our fathers. The great challenge facing us is to be ready to enter these doors as they open. Ralph Waldo Emerson said in a lecture back in 1871, that if a man can write a better book, or preach a better sermon or make a better mouse trap than his neighbor,
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even if he builds his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door. This will become increasing true and so it means that we must set out to do a good job and try to do it so well that nobody could do it any better. Now don’t set out to do a good Negro job. You see we are now in a situation where we are forced to compete with people. And anybody setting out to be a good Negro (APPLAUSE) you see if you set out merely to be a good Negro lawyer, or a good Negro doctor, or a good Negro school teacher, a good Negro preacher, a good Negro skilled laborer, a good Negro barber or beautician, you’ve already flunked your matriculation exam for entrance to the university of integration. (APPLAUSE) We must set out to do a good job and to do that job so well that the living, the dead, or the unborn couldn’t do it any better. (APPLAUSE) And so to carry to one extreme, if it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures. Sweep streets like Beethoven composed music. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will have to pause and say, “Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.” (APPLAUSE) If you can’t be a pine on the top of the hill be a scrub in the valley, but be the best little scrub on the side of the rill. Be a bush if you can’t be a tree. If you can’t be a highway, just be a trail. If you can’t be the sun, be a star, for it isn’t by size that you win or you fail. Be the best of whatever you are. (APPLAUSE) And if we will do this we will remain awake through a great social revolution.
There is another thing, a thing that faces all of us. We are challenged to develop an action program all over our nation to get rid of the last vestiges of segregation and discrimination. And this problem will not work itself out, and anybody who believes that is sleeping through a revolution. If the problem of segregation and discrimination is to be removed from our nation, we must work hard in an action program to do it. Now, there are one or two ideas that I mention so often that we’ve got to get rid of. They’re myths. And if we are going to solve this problem, we’ve got to get rid of them. One is the myth of time. You’ve heard this argument. The people who believe this go on to say to the Negro and his allies in the white community, that only time can solve the problem. And they go on to say if you will just be nice, and be patient, and continue to pray in a hundred or two hundred years the problem will work itself out. Now I am not criticizing prayer,
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certainly not, for it has been one of the great resources of my life and in the darkest moments, the moments that I have had to stand amid the surging movement of life’s restless sea, prayer has been so meaningful to me. So don’t misunderstand me. I am not saying that prayer does not have a value. But I am saying that God never intended for prayer to be a substitute for working intelligence. (APPLAUSE) The only answer that we can give to those who believe in the myth of time is that time is neutral. It can be used either constructively or destructively. And I am absolutely convinced as I stand before you tonight my friends that the people of ill will in our nation have used time much more effectively than the people of good will. I am convinced tonight that the Wallace’s of our nation and the extreme rightists of our nation and those who are committed to negative ends have used time much more effectively than those who are committed to good ends. And it may well be that we will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people who will bomb a church in Birmingham, Alabama, but also for the appalling silence of the good people who sit around saying, “Wait on time.” (APPLAUSE) Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. And so we must help time and realize that the time is always right to do right.
And I am sure you have heard the other myth. You hear it here in California and we hear it all over the nation now because of the Civil Rights debate. It is the idea that legislation cannot solve the problem which we face in human relations. I am sure you have heard that. People who believe in this and who set forth this argument will go on to say that the only way that this problem can be solved is through changing the heart and changing attitudes. And they say you can’t do that through legislation. Well certainly they are uttering a half truth. If we are to solve this problem that we face in our nation ultimately, Negroes and white people must come together as brothers and sisters, not merely because the law says it, but because it is natural and right. If this problem is to be solved ultimately, men must not only be obedient to that which can be enforced by the law. We must rise to the majestic heights of being obedient to the unenforceable. I am aware of this. But
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we must go on and state the other side. It may be true that you can’t legislate integration, but you can legislate desegregation. It may be true that morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. (APPLAUSE) It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law can’t make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important also. (APPLAUSE) And so while the law may not change the hearts of men, it does change the habits of men. And when the habits are changed, pretty soon the heart will be changed and the attitudes will be changed. (APPLAUSE)
And so there is a need for Civil Rights legislation now on the national scale and in local communities all over our nation. I would like to impress upon you this evening the importance of this. There is a debate taking place in the Senate of our nation now. And it has moved from the realm of legitimate debate. It is a filibuster. It is a filibuster clothed in the garments of gentlemanly debate, and it is time now that the Senate go on and vote on this vital bill which can do so much to restore the sense of hope in the Negro community and give the Negro new faith in the legislative and democratic process. It is urgent that this Civil Rights Bill be passed and passed very soon. Now there are those who are trying to weaken that bill. They are trying to weaken it with crippling amendments and somehow all people of goodwill through letter writing campaigns, through visits to Washington to various Senators, and through other methods of direct action and created witnesses, to make it clear that this bill must pass. It was on a sweltering afternoon last June, and a young vigorous intelligent dedicated President stood before this nation and said in eloquent terms, “The issue which we face in Civil Rights is not merely a political issue. It is at bottom a moral issue.” He went on to say it is as old as the Scriptures and as modern as the Constitution. It is a question of whether we will treat our Negro brothers as we ourselves would like to be treated. And on the heels of this great speech he went and offered a Civil Rights package to Congress. The most comprehensive Civil Rights package every presented by any president of our great nation. (APPLAUSE) Since that sweltering afternoon last June, our nation has known a dark day and a dreary night, for that same President was cut down by an assassin’s bullet on Elm Street in Dallas, Texas. And I think the greatest tribute that the United States of America can pay to the late
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John Fitzgerald Kennedy is to see that this Civil Rights Bill is passed without being watered down at any point. (APPLAUSE)
So if this bill does not pass, I am absolutely convinced that our nation will experience a dark night. If this bill does not pass the already ugly sore of racial injustice on the body politic may suddenly turn malignant and our Nation may well be inflicted with an incurable cancer that will destroy our political and moral health. It is urgent for the health of the nation for this Civil Rights Bill to be passed. And it is necessary that in local communities, and in States all over our nation, to make Civil Rights legislation a reality and to make its firm enforcement a reality. And right here in this state, in this great state, in this state that has meant so much to our nation, in this the most populous state of our nation, you have a great choice. It is a choice of treading the low road of injustice or remaining true to the high road of justice. You have a choice of whether you will go backwards or whether you will go forward. You have a choice whether you will be true to the ideals of justice, or whether you will somehow go back and choose those principles of injustice, which will hurt our whole nation, for there are forces alive in this state seeking to repeal the Fair Housing Bill, which has existed on the books, on the statute books of California. And if this bill is repealed, it will be a setback not merely for California. It will be a setback for the nation; it will be a setback for democracy; and it will be one of the great tragedies of the 20th century. (APPLAUSE) And so, I call upon you each of you assembled here tonight to work passionately and unrelentingly to defeat the proposed Constitutional Housing Amendment in California. And with this, and with other forces working, I believe this can be done.
Now I do not want to give the impression that there is nothing for the Negro himself to do. The Federal Government can’t solve the whole problem. I said over and over again that if justice is to be a reality for the Negro in America, the Negro must feel a basic responsibility and a basic urge to struggle and sacrifice for that freedom and justice. And so this is the meaning of the movement. This is the meaning of what is taking place in our nation today. It is the meaning of the demonstrations. This is behind the freedom rides that you hear about here and there, the sitins, the standins, the wadeins, the kneelins, and all of the other “ins.” They are all for the purpose of getting America out of the dilemma in which
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she finds herself as a result of the continued existence of segregation and discrimination. And I am convinced that if this problem is to be solved, we must delve deeper into strong action programs to keep the issue before the forefront of the nation.
But as I have said all across the country, I am convinced that our struggle must be a nonviolent struggle. I am convinced that our basic thrust must be nonviolent. But if the Negro succumbs to the temptation of using violence in his struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and our chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos. And there is another way, a way as old as the insights of Jesus of Nazareth, and as modern as the techniques of Mohandas K. Gandhi. There is another way. A way as old as Jesus saying, “Turn the other cheek.” And as modern as Gandhi saying, through Thoreau, that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. And I believe that through this other way we will have a powerful pushing movement that will change the very structure and bring about justice and freedom. And there is power in nonviolent resistance. It has a way of disarming the opponent. It exposes his moral defenses. It weakens his morale and at the same time it works on his conscience, and he just doesn’t know how to handle it. If he doesn’t beat you, wonderful. If he beats you, you develop the quiet courage of accepting blows without retaliating. If he doesn’t put you in jail, wonderful, nobody with any sense loves to go to jail. But if he puts you in jail, you go in that jail and transform it from a dungeon of shame to a haven of freedom and human dignity. Even if he tries to kill you. (APPLAUSE)
Even if he tries to kill you, you develop the inner conviction that there are some things so clear, some things so precious, so eternally true that they’re worth dying for. (APPLAUSE) And if a man stands before some truth he may be 30 years old, some great principle stands at the door of his life, some great truth, some great issue and he refuses to take a stand because he’s afraid that his home may get bombed or he’s afraid that he may lose a job or he’s afraid that he may get killed. He may go and live until he’s 80, but he’s just as dead at 30 as he will be at 80. (APPLAUSE)
And in a real sense the cessation of breathing in his life is merely the
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belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit. He died when he refused to take a stand for that which is right, for that which is noble, for that which is just, and that which is true. When one is committed to this he has power, and there is another thing about this method of non-violence. It says that it is possible to struggle to secure moral ends through moral means. One of the great debates of history has been over the whole question of ends and means. There have been those thinkers who argue that the end justifies the means. Sometimes whole systems of government have followed this theory. And I think one of the great weaknesses of the misguided philosophy of communism is right here. In so many instances in its theoretical structure, it argues that any method is justifiable in order to bring into being the goal of the end of the classless society. For this is where nonviolence would break with communism or any other system which argues that the end justifies the means. In a real sense the end is preexistent in the means. The means represent the ideal in the making and the end in process. And in the long run of history, destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends, and it is a beautiful thing to have a method of struggle which says you can work to secure moral ends through moral means. And the other thing that is beautiful about nonviolence is that you can come to the point that you stand up against the unjust system and yet not hate the perpetrators of that unjust system. Oh this is very difficult, but it is possible. The love ethic can stand at the center of the struggle of racial justice. So often we fail to see the danger of hate. Hate is as injurious to the hater as it is to the hated. Psychiatrists are telling us now that many of the strange things that happen in the subconscious, many of the inner conflicts, are rooted in hate. And they are saying, “Love or perish.” Well, Jesus said it long time ago: “Love your enemies. Bless them that curse you. Pray for them that despitefully use you.” And so in some way, even though it has been very difficult, we have been able to say to our most violent opponents:
We will match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws and so, throw us in jail, and we will still love you. Yes, bomb our homes and threaten our children and, as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities at the midnight hour, and drag us
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out on some wayside road and beat us and leave us half dead and, as difficult as it is, we will still love you. But be you assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer and one day we will win our freedom. But we will not only win freedom for ourselves. We will so appeal to your heart and your conscience that we will win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.
This is a nonviolent method, and this is its philosophy. And I believe that if we will go this way, and if we will continue to stand up against the unjust system with determination, we will be able to bring into being that better day, that great America. We will be able to bring into being the brotherhood of man. And may I reiterate, this problem will not work itself out. May I say, my friends, that it is not merely a sectional problem. Many things have happened over the last few months to reveal to us that we are dealing with a national problem, and that no section of our country can boast of clean hands in the area of brotherhood. And it is one thing for a white person of good will outside of the South to rise up with righteous indignation when the busses burn with freedom riders in Anniston, Alabama; or when a church is bombed in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four innocent, beautiful, unoffending girls; or when a courageous James Meredith cannot go to the University of Mississippi without confronting riotous conditions. That same white person of good will outside the South must rise up with righteous indignation when a Negro cannot live in his neighborhood, or when a Negro cannot get a job in his particular firm, or when a Negro cannot join a particular fraternity, sorority, academic or professional society. If this problem is to be solved there must be a Divine discontent. Somebody must come to believe this thing is so important that they are willing to give all that they have to make the brotherhood of man a reality. If this problem is to be solved there is need for another Amos to rise up in our nation. And cry out in words echoing across the centuries, “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” If this problem is to be solved, there is need for another Abraham Lincoln to see that this nation cannot survive half slave and half free. If this problem is to be solved, there is need for another Jefferson to see in the midst of an age amazingly adjusted to slavery and in words lifted to cosmic proportions, “We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.” If this
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problem is to be solved, somebody must say, with Jesus of Nazareth, “He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword.” And when we come to see this, we will be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man, into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice. This is our challenge, and this is our responsibility.
And may I say to you, my friends, that I still have faith in the future. I know these are difficult moments and so many of us are faced with problems day in and day out. And I know that we are still at the bottom of the economic ladder, still the last hired and the first fired. I know that we are forced to stand amidst conditions of oppression, trampled over day in and day night by the iron feet of injustice. But in spite of this I still believe that we have the resources in this nation to solve this problem, and that we will solve this problem. And so I can still sing our theme song “We shall overcome, we shall overcome, deep in my heart I do believe, we shall overcome, before the victory’s won.” (APPLAUSE) Before the victory is won some more will be scarred up a bit, but we shall overcome. Before the victory for justice is won, some more will have to be thrown into dark and lonesome jail cells, but we shall overcome. Before the victory is won, some will be misunderstood and called bad names. Some will be called “communists” and “red” simply because they believe in the brotherhood of man, but we shall overcome. Before the victory is won, somebody else like a Medgar Evers may have to face physical death, but if physical death is the price that some must pay to free their children from a permanent psychological death, then nothing can be more redemptive. Yes, we shall overcome. And I’ll tell you why. Because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. We shall overcome because Carlisle is right, “No lie can live forever.” We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right, “Truth crushed to earth will rise again.” We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell is right, “Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne. Yet that scaffold sways the future and behind the dim unknown standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch upon his own.” We shall overcome because the Bible is right, “You shall reap what you sow.” (APPLAUSE) And so with this faith we will be able to hew out of this mountain of despair the stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. This is the challenge!
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And so I leave you tonight by saying, Work with this movement, support this movement, struggle for this movement, knowing that in struggling for freedom and justice and human dignity, you are being a co-worker with God. Stand up for justice, not next week, not even tomorrow, not even a hour from now, but at this moment, realizing a tiny little minute, just sixty seconds in it, I didn’t choose it, I can’t refuse it, it’s up to me to use it. A tiny little minute, just sixty seconds in it, but eternity is in it. God bless you. (APPLAUSE)
NOTES 1. Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” address on the steps of Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. was on August 28, 1963. 2. Various local black leaders also called San Diego the “Selma of the West,” again referencing a locale with an extremely poor record on racial equality. 3. Waymon often invoked the following example to describe the abysmal state of San Diego’s civil rights situation during the early 1960s: “President Obama was born in 1961. If his mother had come to San Diego to give birth, as a [white] woman married to a black man, she could not have entered a major hospital except for Mercy Hospital. None of the other hospitals would have accepted her. She [and her husband] could not have eaten in a restaurant or stayed in a hotel. Not a single hotel in San Diego allowed blacks to be there.” 4. During this time, the overwhelming majority of African-Americans in San Diego were restricted to living in Logan Heights, Linda Vista, and Frontier (Old Town). This was not a San Diego phenomenon as Los Angeles was 99% segregated in 1960. 5. SDSU alumnus Joaquin Banda recalled that on the day of the 1964 King speech at San Diego State, “I noticed people handing out RED flyers [stating] that COMMUNIST Martin Luther King was speaking and discouraging us from attending. I believe, but [am] not certain, that they were from the John Birch Society.” (E-mail correspondence April 5, 2014) The May 30, 1964, San Diego Union (A15, 18) reported that, “Leaflets purporting to identify King as a former student at a ‘Communist training school’ in Tennessee were distributed at SDS and Cal Western yesterday before King’s appearances… [T]he leaflets, which bore the imprint of the ‘San Diego Patriotic Forum,’ included a picture of King purportedly taken in 1957 at the Highlander Folk School at Monteagie, Tenn. The leaflet said the school later was closed ‘because it was charged with being subservisive [sic].’” Dr. Ralph Abernathy of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who was part of Dr. King’s coterie for the California trip, explained to reporters that, “the school was finally closed, not because it was subversive, but because a lot of people objected to its being interracial.” Former SDSU student Lou Curtiss also recalled the protests against King at State, noting that, “There were a few right-wing kind of pickets out there, the “Students for Freedom” and that gang. You know they have their little signs—‘If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck…’—and all those sorts of things.” Lou Curtiss, interviewed by Tobin Vaughn, April 3, 2014; Lou Curtiss, interviewed by Seth Mallios, April 18, 2014. 6. Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63. (New York: Touchstone, 1988), 906. 7. David P. Oppenheimer, “California’s Anti-Discrimination Legislation, Proposition 14, and the Constitutional Protection of Minority Rights: The Fiftieth Anniversary of the California Fair Employment and Housing Act,” 40 Golden Gate U. L. Rev. (2009) pp. 117-127.
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8. Nixon was so frustrated by this upset defeat that he announced his departure from politics, famously declaring, “You won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore.” He would be president six years later. 9. The repeal of the Berkeley Fair-Housing ordinance occurred on the same day that Dr. King arrived in Birmingham, Alabama, the most segregated city in the United States, for one of his most famous confrontations. 10. At this time, King was incarcerated in Birmingham for “parading without a permit” and had just been lambasted in print by fellow clergymen for “unwise and untimely” practices. The civil rights leader made a rare public response to this criticism with his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” penned in the margins of a smuggled-in newspaper. One of the most famous and quoted essays of the century, King’s letter directly linked the African-American cause with the discipleship of Christianity and the formation of the nation, concluding, “One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters they were in reality standing up for the best in the American dream and the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage, and thusly, carrying our whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.” James Washington, ed., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. (San Francisco: Harper Collins: 1986), 302. 11. Alpine Echo 7, no. 2 (January 16, 1964), 2, 7. 12. Proposition 14 would have added the following amendment to the California constitution: “Neither the State nor any subdivision or agency thereof shall deny, limit or abridge, directly or indirectly, the right of any person, who is willing or desires to sell, lease or rent any part or all of his real property, to decline to sell, lease or rent such property to such person or persons as he, in his absolute discretion, chooses.” 13. William H. Brown, Jr., “The Role of the Real Estate Industry,” Economic Geography 48, no. 1 (January 1972): 66-78. 14. Charles Rice, “Bias in Housing: Toward a New Approach,” Santa Clara Lawyer 6 (1965): 162-171. 15. King was simultaneously battling overt racism in the South—e.g., on January 18, 1963, incoming Alabama governor George Wallace called for “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” in his inaugural address—and better-disguised bigotry in the North and West (like California’s Proposition 14). 16. Both King, Sr. and his son were born “Michael Luther King” but would change their names in honor of the seminal Protestant, Martin Luther. 17. Willie J. Horton, Jr., interviewed by Seth Mallios, April 11, 2014. 18. Branch (1989) has an extended discussion and analysis about how King and his colleagues prepared to fight segregation on public transit in the South long before Parks’ epic confrontation and waited for the perfect set of circumstances to launch their protest. 19. Chida Warren-Darby, “The Mortician and the King,” Voice & Viewpoint 52, no. 3 (January 19, 2012), A1, B3, C8. 20. Willie J. Horton, Jr., interviewed by Tobin Vaughn, April 9, 2014. 21. Robert Fikes, Jr., “The Struggle for Equality” in “America’s Finest City”: A History of the San Diego NAACP (San Diego: San Diego State University, 2012), 8. 22. Monica Garske, “SDSU Seeks Mementos from MLK Jr., Campus Address,” KNSD, NBC 7 San Diego, April 3, 2014. 23. Chida Warren-Darby, “The Mortician and the King,” Voice & Viewpoint 52, no. 3 (January 19, 2012), A1, B3, C8. 24. Most of the pictures of King during the 1964 San Diego visit, including those with Oliver upon
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landing, being interviewed by Keen, speaking at SDSC, and lecturing at Cal Western, show King wearing a dark suit with a dark tie. Only the image of King with Hartwell Ragsdale shows King with a dark suit and a light-colored tie. This also suggests that the King/Ragsdale meeting was from a different time, possibly 1960 instead of 1964, unless one believes that King started the day with a dark tie, switched to a light tie for the meeting with Ragsdale, and then switched back to a dark tie for his speaking engagements. 25. National media coverage captured many of the St. Augustine atrocities, including the ill-fated attempt of protestors to integrate the beaches of adjacent Anastasia Island. Segregationists beat and drove the activists into the water, many of whom could not swim. As the Keen interview detailed, King’s cottage was fired upon while he traveled to California, but his troubles in St. Augustine were just beginning. He would be arrested there on June 11, 1964, which further escalated racial tensions. This conflict then erupted in one of the most dramatic episodes of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s (and one whose disturbing photographs were most widely disseminated by the media) when black and white protestors jumped into the whites- only Monson Motor Lodge Pool and refused to leave; hotel manager James Brock responded by pouring muriatic acid into the pool. 26. Brooklyn CORE activists protested the opening of the World’s Fair in New York on April 22, 1964, by blocking cars on major highways, attempting to cause the cars to run out of gas and stall on the roads. Their “stall-in” efforts would have been more successful had there not been a major generational rift within Brooklyn’s CORE membership—elders were against these brash tactics and more youthful members even advocated releasing rats when President Johnson made his address—and had terrible weather not kept crowds to an opening-day minimum. 27. Democratic Alabama governor George Wallace announced his intention to run for president in opposition to President Kennedy a week before JFK was assassinated. He continued his pursuit of the presidency against President Johnson, entering the democratic primaries in 1964 and did well in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Maryland. 28. This question refers to prominent Republicans campaigning in California but not pursuing California offices. Nelson Rockefeller was the liberal Republican governor of New York, and Barry Goldwater was a conservative U.S. senator from Arizona. 29. Ross Barnett was the democratic governor of Mississippi from 1960-64; he was a staunch segregationist. Paul B. Johnson, Jr. succeeded Barnett, serving from 1964-68; he was also a democrat who opposed integration and supported Jim Crow laws. 30. The Greek Bowl, a WPA project that was formally dedicated on May 2, 1941, is part of SDSU’s Historic District, which is on the National Register of Historic Places. Seth Mallios, Hail Montezuma: The Hidden Treasures of San Diego State (San Diego: Montezuma Publishing, 2012). During the 1970s, students and university officials began referring to it predominantly as the “Open Air Theatre,” the name it uses today. 31. Daily Aztec 43, no. 110 (May 29, 1964), 1; The San Diego Union, May 29, 1964, A-13. 32. Cathy Pearson, Daily Aztec 43, no. 111 (June 2, 1964), 9. 33. The San Diego Union, May 30, 1964, A18. 34. Mary Cook, interviewed by Seth Mallios, April 14, 2014. 35. James Sibbet, e-mail correspondence, April 3, 2014. 36. Monica Garske, “SDSU Seeks Mementos from MLK Jr., Campus Address,” KNSD, NBC 7 San Diego, April 3, 2014. 37. Ralph Clem, interviewed by Tobin Vaughn, March 6, 2014. 38. In 1907, Lela Goodwin was San Diego State’s first African-American student. Mallios, Hail Montezuma! 39. For example, in March 1964, twenty San Diego State College students traveled to Atlanta to
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help with voter registration, a nationwide program sponsored by the Y.M.C.A. and aimed at combatting racial discrimination at the polls. 40. Mary Oliver, interviewed by Michael Armstrong, January 12, 2007. Interview provided to authors by Darrel Oliver. 41. Darrell Oliver, interviewed by Breana Campbell, April 29, 2014. 42. Although the footage of King’ SDSC speech from Channel 8 is grainy, it does appear that nearly all of the audience was white. This may have led King to observe and remark, by contrast, that the Cal Western crowd was notably ethnically diverse. 43. Darrel Oliver, interviewed by Breana Campbell, April 29, 2014. 44. The San Diego Union, May 30, 1964, A15. 45. Darrel Oliver, interviewed by Breana Campbell, April 29, 2014. 46. Raymond E. Wolfinger and Fred I. Greenstein, in “The Repeal of Fair Housing in California: An Analysis of Referendum Voting,” American Political Science Review, 42 (September 1968), 753-769, revealed that Californians overwhelmingly voted in favor of Proposition 14 according to race (white), region (Southern California), income levels (wealthy), and political ideology (Republican). 47. It was not until 1968 that the federal Fair Housing Act was passed, signed into law by President Johnson during the King assassination riots. 48. The authors were denied access to a copy by Stanford University’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute—even though its Online King Records Access website (OKRA) indicated that it had a copy of the Cal Western speech; Director Tenisha Hart Armstrong explained that, “The King Institute is not an archive.” (E-mail correspondence from Tenisha Hart Armstrong, February 26, 2014). The authors then failed to get a copy from KPBS, which aired the speech in its entirety on January 20, 1992, but subsequently misplaced the audio during an archive transfer. After these missteps, the importance of locating the speech and making it part of the permanent historic record of San Diego was clear. Ironically, the address transcribed below came from Jack Rohrer, who had taped the re-broadcast of the speech off of the radio in 1992. Although initial attempts to obtain the speech through Point Loma Nazarene University officials were unsuccessful, they would fortunately locate the address in time for their anniversary celebration in 2014. 49. Dr. King gave different versions of this Cal Western speech on multiple occasions. In fact, the last Sunday morning sermon of his life on March 31, 1968, in Washington, D.C. was also entitled, “Remaining Awake through a Great Revolution.” Regardless of context, the “Remaining Awake…” address always began with the Rip Van Winkle story, which came from a book of sermons by prominent American Methodist preacher Halford E. Luccock, entitled, Marching off the Map: And Other Sermons (Harper: New York, 1952). Arizona State University English professor and MLK specialist Keith Miller explained that, “For most of his career, Dr. King had about a dozen sermons that he gave and re-gave, sometimes mixing material. He had hours and hours of memorized material that he could give without a single note. And sometimes, he gave other speeches or sermons too. Hearing him was like going to a concert and hearing something familiar with something new (e.g., a comment on a very recent event, like the St. Augustine attacks). E-mail correspondence Keith Miller, February 7, 2014.
410 EXHIBIT REVIEWS
Landscape, Seascape, Dreamscape Masterworks: Art of the Exposition Era
By Molly McClain
One hundred years ago, tourists travelled west on railways and steamships to see California—its mountains, valleys, deserts, and ocean. Their destination: two great World’s Fairs held at opposite ends of the state. In 1915, San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition and San Diego’s Panama-California Exposition celebrated a technological marvel— the Panama Canal—that promised to bring untold numbers of immigrants to the West Coast. They also invited visitors to learn more about the history, culture, and achievements of The Golden State. “Masterworks: Art of the Exposition Era” at the San Diego History Alice Klauber- California Tower, ca 1915. Photo courtesy SDHC. Center through January 3, 2016, recalls the panoramas of sea, hills, and sky that visitors expected to see on their arrival. The scenic beauty of Southern California rivaled that of Tuscany
Molly McClain is a professor in the department of history at the University of San Diego and co- editor of The Journal of San Diego History. She is the author of three books and numerous historical articles. Her forthcoming biography focuses on the life of philanthropist Ellen Browning Scripps.
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Alice Klauber, Boats and Pier. Photo courtesy SDHC.
and the Italian Riviera, causing more than one writer to describe the region as “Our Italy.”1 Guidebooks, meanwhile, promoted the romantic vision of Spanish California described by Helen Hunt Jackson in her novel, Ramona (1884). Tourists imagined orange groves, shady patios and verandas draped with vines, amid picturesque adobe ruins. Curators Bram Dijkstra and Harry Katz have organized an inspiring exhibit that contains two-dozen landscape paintings by the plein air painters known as California impressionists, along with select works by East Coast and San Diego modernists. The catalog contains valuable essays by Dijkstra and Derrick Cartwright along with short biographical profiles of the artists. Together with “San Diego Invites the World: The 1915 Expo” and the Noel Baza Fine Art Gallery’s “Under the Same Sky,” the current exhibit helps us understand what drew early twentieth-century visitors to California, and why many decided to stay. Art not only imitates reality; it can create it. San Diego’s Panama-California Exposition, like most World’s Fairs, combined art, industry, and entertainment with salesmanship. One writer described it as “California’s County Fair.”2 Promoters sold the West as a confident and forward-
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looking place to do business, develop a ranch or farm, or vacation among the cottonwood and pepper trees. Agriculture was a focus of the exhibition, so much so that the International Harvester Company showed tractors, harvesters, and other machines in a five-acre demonstration field. There was a model farm and bungalow, orchards with citrus and other fruit-bearing trees, even a vineyard. Murals depicted the grains and grasses found in the San Joaquin Valley, while other exhibits focused on economic opportunities in western states such as Utah and Nevada. Thanks to the energy and organizational skills of the Woman’s Board of the Panama-California Exposition, there were several modern art exhibits at the fair: one in the Southern California Counties Building, one in the Woman’s Headquarters, and two others in the Fine Arts Building located across the quadrangle from the California Building. In 1914, Alice Klauber, chair of the Art Committee, persuaded both the California Art Club of Los Angeles and the New York artist Robert Henri to organize shows. Having responded enthusiastically to avant-garde Cubist and Futurist art on display at the Armory Show in 1913, Klauber believed that the time had come for San Diegans to “awake” to the new possibilities presented by modern artists who had painted in the Southwest and along the Pacific Coast.3 The Southern California Counties Building hosted the largest group of paintings. The palatial Spanish colonial revival structure stood on the site of what is now the San Diego Museum of Natural History. On the lower floor, visitors could see prosaic products typically displayed at county fairs, like china painting and hemstitched aprons. There was even a refrigerated sculpture of a milkmaid and a cow made entirely of butter.4 Upstairs, the fine art gallery contained 100 paintings and 14 pieces of sculpture by some of the best artists in Southern California. Visitors came away astonished by the quality and variety of the show. “California is ideal landscape country,” gushed one Los Angeles critic, “I realized as never before that we of the Big West have at last attained to an art of native expression.”5 The California Art Club of Los Angeles organized the 1915 show. Artists who had been living in Southern California for at least two years were invited to submit their work to a jury of fellow artists. Among those selected were William Wendt, a founding member of both the California Art Club and the Laguna Beach Art Association; Maurice Braun, whose interest in Theosophy led him to seek the California light; and Charles A. Fries, a prolific San Diego landscape painter. Female painters included Donna Schuster who often painted outdoor scenes of women and girls, and Anna A. Hills, active in the Laguna Beach art colony. The gallery in the Southern California Counties Building also contained display cases
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holding hand-made jewelry, pottery, needlework, and decorative tiles.6 The current exhibit, “Masterworks: Art of the Exposition Era,” includes a number of exceptional paintings from the exposition, many of which remain in the hands of private collectors. William Wendt’s Mountain Infinity (1913), which won the Grand Prize, reveals the vitality of nature through rugged mountain forms and patches of snow illuminated by the early spring light. He described how it felt to paint outdoors: “Here the heart of man becomes impressionable. Here, away from conflicting creeds and sects, away from the soul-destroying hurly-burly of life, it feels that the world is beautiful; that man is his brother; that God is good.”7 Paintings depicting a largely empty western landscape suggested that the region welcomed settlement, one of the main themes of San Diego’s exposition. California, in particular, offered renewed health, spiritual sustenance, and the possibility of personal transformation. Today, we see these images through a lens of nostalgia for many of these natural landscapes have been lost to human habitation. In 1915, however, paintings were viewed as evidence that modern industrialization had not affected California, and perhaps never would. One art critic wrote, “This is a state of natural health. It is the land of the great out of doors, a region where art…may put aside its dreary, tortuous intellectualism and the bighting madness of self-deification, and turn its eyes once again to the stars, to the great mountains, and to the sea, not merely for their own sakes, but because, real and actual as they are, they are but symbols of divine realities.”8 Charles Fries’ prize-winning Cuyamaca Mountain (c. 1910-15) captures the stern beauty of San Diego’s east county landscape. Rocky outcrops among the chaparral-covered hills of Alpine lead the eye towards Cuyamaca Peak. Dijkstra’s essay in the exhibition catalog characterizes it as a “prehistoric environment, both forbidding and oddly inviting; a brilliant rendering of the not-yet civilized, not yet ‘humanized’ world of rocks and rolling hills at the time still interposing itself between Southern California and civilization.”9 After being shown at the 1915 Exposition, it hung for many years in Russ High School’s library.10 Artists tried to read meaning into the western landscape, some more successfully than others. Everett C. Maxwell noted, “There is a rich mellowness, a brooding melancholy, about the Southwest that allures and eludes, and painters, poets, and romantics never tire of trying to read the hidden meaning that lies back of the smiling mask of the rolling hills of Southern California and the stern, merciless beauty of the Pacific.”11 Maurice Braun believed that the natural world offered a channel for subjective emotion. His California Hills (1914) offers a brilliantly colored vision of the southland from the point of view of a Theosophist, one who believed in the visible manifestation of spiritual ideas. A foreground of poppies and lupines, eucalyptus,
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William Wendt, Mountain Infinity, 1913. Grand prize winner, 1915 exhibition. and oak trees draws the eye to a sunny valley surrounded by overlapping mountain ranges, tinged with vivid greens and purples. His arrangement of colors was intended to delineate physical, mental, and spiritual realms. Several of his works are on view here, including Bay and City of San Diego (1910), Landscape with Poplars (1914), Southern California Hills (1915), California Tower (1915), Summer Pond (c. 1915-20), Autumn Tints (1919), and an untitled view from the California Tower. Western landscapes often had more appeal to visitors than to residents of California, many of whom saw “too much local brown” to accept purple shadows and golden hills.12 Ellen Browning Scripps remarked on a retrospective of Braun’s work before the artist left San Diego to establish a studio in New York, “Maurice Braun has a room all to himself—full of glow and color, 65 paintings in all. He takes them East where I hope he will find more appreciation than he does here. I suppose he puts his prices beyond people’s consciences or purses and there is an aggressiveness of color which wouldn’t fit in when the real thing is at hand. Nevertheless, it is a joy to look at them!”13 Among the modernists who experimented with line, color, and form was Alice Klauber who showed her work in the Little Gallery in 1915. Six of her works, some rarely exhibited, are on view in the current exhibit. After a 1912 trip to Europe
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to study with modernist Robert Henri, her painting became looser in style, less strictly representational. One might compare an untitled landscape consisting of houses and a bridge under a bright blue sky, composed in 1910, with her California Tower (1915), a modernist work that expressed the energy and dynamism of the exposition’s architectural style. Klauber said that her aim was to illustrate life, “not life arrested to a pose.” She valued art that expressed “the universal vitality” of the human experience and argued that a sketch could be more valuable than the finished product because “the vital essence had been caught in these first impressions.”14 Theosophists, aestheticians, and romantics worked side by side at the turn of the twentieth century to create a distinctive Southern California style that sharply emerges into focus in the “Masterworks” exhibition. The highly ornate California Building captured the imagination of many artists. The architecture of the exposition commemorated the Spanish who had created a global empire that spanned the Pacific Ocean in the period 1500-1800. Bertram Goodhue mined a variety of architectural styles to produce the Spanish Colonial Revival structure that greeted visitors on their entrance to the exposition. A corner of the “Masterworks” exhibit is devoted to paintings of the California Building, among other structures. It includes works by Colin Campbell Cooper, Alson Skinner Clark, Maurice Braun, and Alice Klauber. Inside the California Building, on the second floor, hung oil paintings by Donald Beauregard, a post-impressionist artist whose works were filled with vigorous brushwork and brilliant color. Klauber arranged with his patron Frank Springer to have his works shown in the Woman’s Headquarters following his untimely death in 1914. “What the pictures did for that room cannot be exaggerated,” she wrote, “For two years they sang across the spaces of a rather cold interior and made it vibrate with clear, fine tones.”15 It is unfortunate that the curators of “Masterworks” could not bring an example of Beauregard’s painting from the New Mexico Museum of Art, where his works have been housed since 1918. Only one painting represents the cutting-edge display of modernism held in the Fine Arts Building: William Glackens’ Skaters, Central Park (1912). His brightly colored and animated canvas depicts a popular wintertime activity enjoyed by ordinary New Yorkers. Glackens was a member of “The Eight,” a group that included Robert Henri and John Sloan. Sometimes known as the “Ashcan School,” these East Coast artists produced paintings that depicted urban life and the leisure activities of the working class. Glackens worked in a post-impressionist style while colleagues showed realist tendencies. Ella Foote, a frequent contributor to the “Art and Artists” column of the San Diego Union, praised the avant-garde nature of their work: “These men have seen a new light…. Nearly every picture seems to be painted, not to sell but as a great experiment.”16
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Robert Henri organized the 1915 exhibit in the Fine Arts Building, convincing his friends that San Diego welcomed new ideas. Cartwright’s essay in the “Masterworks” catalog describes the artist’s 1914 trip to San Diego, organized by his former student Klauber, and his fascination with the “interesting people” that he found here, among them Mexican-, Chinese-, African-, and Native Americans. It also emphasizes Henri’s exasperation with the conservative practices of established art institutions in the East. San Diego’s exposition gave him an opportunity to “show on the other edge” with “a small group of American art of Today.”17 The modernist paintings in the Fine Arts Building contrasted with Native American artifacts on display in other parts of the fair. These included examples of art, archeology, and material culture from native communities in North, South, and Central America. There were two Indian villages populated by several Southwest tribes, collections of native crafts, and an ancient art exhibition that included full-size casts of Maya steles. Dr. Edgar L. Hewett, an anthropologist, organized these shows in conjunction with Dr. Ales Hdrlicka of the U.S. National Museum in an effort to illustrate the civilizations that “so impressed the Spanish conquerors when they first saw the shores of Mexico and Central America.”18 One visitor thought that these exhibits represented a lost “golden age” in which art was a communal possession, “a manifestation of the spirit of beauty mingling its mystic breath with ordinary, humdrum, daily life.”19 Joseph Henry Sharp, a founding member of the Taos Society of Artists, documented the vanishing cultural practices of American Indians at the same time that railways and tourists began to transform New Mexico. Several of his paintings hung in the Southern California Building in 1915, among them, Sunset Dance and Moonlight, Grand Canyon.20 On view in “Masterworks” is The Stoic (1914). It is a dark painting, showing a father grieving the death of his warrior son. The Indian has cut the muscles of his back and tied on buffalo thongs; he drags several pony heads behind him in a public display of both stoicism (from Sharp’s point of view) and suffering. The early twentieth-century artists represented in “Masterworks” captured an ephemeral moment in the history of the American West. The landscape, and the lives of people who lived on the land, were poised for dramatic transformation. The same railways that brought tourists to the Panama-California Exposition would bring a wave of newcomers in the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s. But, in 1915, Southern California artists and residents believed that mountains were eternal and hills would be forever gold. Note: In July 2015, the curators of “Masterworks: Art of the Exposition Era” will rotate the current paintings on display with others, so plan to visit at least twice before the show closes on January 3, 2016.
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NOTES 1. Charles Dudley Warner, Our Italy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1892); Grace Ellery Channing, “Italy and ‘Our Italy,’” Land of Sunshine 11 (1899): 24-29. 2. Geddes Smith, “California’s County Fair,” The Independent 83, no. 3477 (July 26, 1915): 119-121. Another writer commented, “It would be unfair to call the San Diego exposition an agricultural show, yet that is what, in the main, it really is…” Edward Estabrook, “What San Diego Has Done,” The Bellman (March 27, 1915), 401. 3. Alice Klauber, “Plea for Western Art at Fair Entered,” The San Diego Union, May 2, 1914, 12. 4. Smith, “California’s County Fair,” 120. 5. “Art and Artists,” The San Diego Union, March 8, 1915, 4. 6. “Prize-Winning Art Works at Exposition Show Skill of Southern Californians,” The San Diego Union, August 29, 1915, 8. 7. Nancy Dustin Wall Moure, William Wendt, 1865-1946 (Laguna Beach: Laguna Beach Museum of Art, 1977), 20. 8. Michael Williams, “The Pageant of California Art,” in Art in California (San Francisco: R.L. Bernier, 1916), 62. 9. Bram Dijkstra, “Masterworks, World Fairs, and the Fickle Finger of Fame,” Masterworks: Art of the Exposition Era (San Diego: San Diego History Center, 2015), 19. 10. Denny Stone, ed., “Memories I Have Heard, Seen, Suffered, and Enjoyed: The Memoirs of Charles A. Fries,” The Journal of San Diego History 47, no. 3 (Summer 2001). 11. Everett C. Maxwell, “The Structure of Western Art,” Art in California, 33. 12. William H. Gerdts, “California Impressionism in Context,” California Impressionism, William H. Gerdts and Will South, eds. (New York: Abbeville Press, 1988), 65. 13. Ellen Browning Scripps to Eliza Virginia Scripps, February 12, 1921, Ellen Browning Scripps Collection, Scripps College, drawer 3, folder 22 (hereafter SC 3/22); Ellen Browning Scripps, Diary, February 12, 1921, SC 24/1; “Artist to Give Farewell Exhibit Here,” The San Diego Union, January 29, 1921, 8; “Friends of Art Open Second Large Exhibit of Paintings,” The San Diego Union, January 30, 1921, 9. 14. “Society,” The San Diego Union, March 28, 1912, 7. 15. Alice Klauber, “The Paintings of Donald Beauregard,” Art and Archaeology 7, nos. 1-2 (January- February 1918), 83. 16. E[lla] W. F[oote], “Art and Artists,” The San Diego Union, February, 2, March 8, 1915. 17. Derrick R. Cartwright, “Modern American Painting: Robert Henri’s Exhibition for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition,” Masterworks, 6 -7. 18. Official Guide Book (Panama-California Exposition, 1915), 20. 19. Michael Williams, “The Pageant of California Art,” in Art in California (San Francisco: R.L. Bernier, Publisher, 1916), 52. 20. “Art and Artists,” The San Diego Union, March 8, 1915, 4.
418 San Diego Invites the World: The 1915 Exposition
By Jonathan Bechtol
Efforts by San Diego to host an exposition in 1915 were a significant undertaking for such a small city. Celebrating the completion of the Panama Canal, civic leaders foresaw an opportunity to increase the city’s stature as the first American port of call on the West Coast and thus to promote economic development. They decided that an exposition was the ideal vehicle to advertise and market the small city. The San Diego History Center’s San Diego Invites the World: The 1915 Expo uses interesting artifacts and well-researched displays to trace the efforts by these enterprising civic leaders and boosters to market and create the Panama- California Exposition in Balboa Park and to explore the legacy of the exposition over the ensuing one hundred years. A common theme throughout the exhibition is local leaders’ use and embellishment of San Diego’s Spanish past to advertise and market the city. Organizers knew that the exposition would have to compete with local, national, and international news ranging from labor strife on the streets of San Diego and a civil war in Mexico to the rumblings of world war. In addition, San Francisco was hosting its own exposition which threatened to attract visitors away from San Diego’s. The exhibition recognizes that organizers relied on the marketability of the region’s mythological Spanish past to make their exposition stand out. Much of the promotional media on display reflect this Spanish myth which described
Jonathan Bechtol holds a Master of Arts degree from California State University, San Marcos, where he wrote his thesis on the history of Balboa Park and its use of public space. He is a Lecturer in History at CSU San Marcos.
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San Diego as a “land of enchantment” where “the whisper of a tranquil rancho life could still be heard.” Obviously, the most tangible legacy of the 1915 exposition is the buildings themselves, many of which have a history all their own which the exhibit delves into deeply. San Diego Invites the World traces not only the creation and use of the originally temporary buildings during the exposition itself but also efforts by local San Diegans and organizations to maintain and keep them as a permanent part of Balboa Park. To correspond with the marketing campaign a unique architectural style, Spanish Mission Revival, was used in the design of nearly all exposition buildings. Essentially an ahistorical style promoted by principle architect Bertram Goodhue, exposition planners preferred its vibrant and ornate look to the more austere yet accurate style promoted by local architect Irving Gill. The city went so far as to demolish the old Santa Fe railroad station for a new building reflecting this style. San Diego Invites the World is a well-researched and aesthetically pleasing exhibition; however, its size inhibits a more thorough narrative of the exposition. Considering it is the centennial celebration, the amount of actual floor space dedicated to the exhibition is quite small and limits the displays and memorabilia. This provides the visitor only a small window into the event that many would argue marks the beginning of modern San Diego. This is a rather superficial concern as the exhibition is clear in detailing the motives of exposition planners and boosters in their attempt to market San Diego to tourists and investors alike. This exhibit does more than retell the story of the 1915 exposition. It also gives the visitor, perhaps inadvertently, a one-hundred year story of boosterism in San Diego. The first part of this story is an account of civic leaders struggling to put their city on the map, an effort that marks a turning point in the economic development of San Diego. The second is the struggle to preserve the exposition grounds themselves as a tourist site and cultural center. Those issues, combined with the Spanish myth narrative and emphasis on the buildings themselves give visitors to this exhibition an enriching insight into San Diego’s past. The exhibition at the San Diego History Center will continue until March 31, 2016.
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421 Coast to Cactus in Southern California The San Diego Natural History Museum
By Adrienne McGraw
A life-size California Grizzly welcomes us to enter Coast to Cactus in Southern California, the newest permanent exhibition at The Nat. Yet the label reminds us that this magnificent creature is now extinct in California. This troubling story is a fitting metaphor for the loss of nature that becomes a subtle theme throughout the exhibition. Coast to Cactus “tells the story of this amazing place we call home” through several immersive vignettes that focus on different habitats in the San Diego region. The open, airy, and well-lit space offers a number of tantalizing choices. I can
Coast to Cactus exhibit. Photo by Pablo Mason courtesy of the San Diego Natural History Museum.
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Coast to Cactus exhibit. Photo by Michael Field courtesy of the San Diego Natural History Museum. jump on board an Airstream in the desert, dive into the mud in an oversized replica of a tidal flat, enter a virtual chaparral, or walk among the oaks or Torrey pines. I first get my bearings at the large topographic map and see what geographic areas are covered in the exhibition. I also take note that the design and production value for this 8,000 square foot exhibition is high, raising my expectations for the experience. Coast to Cactus offers multiple access points for people of different interests, abilities, and sizes. For the little guys: touchables, crawl-throughs, and things to smell and hear. Bilingual English-Spanish labels are concisely written and generally not over-burdened with too much text. They offer facts and prompt us to think about our own actions. A scattering of historical and cultural objects and recorded oral histories provide deeper context for those who pause to take this in. There are also several tanks with live creatures and just enough places to sit. My visit was highlighted in two areas, both at the edges of wild. Animals of the desert night are featured in an intriguing mini-object theater where visitors are startled by scorpion, snake, owl, and ringtail cat. Through animation, sounds, and moving animal replicas, creatures come to life as two young campers talk about what’s just outside their tent on this spooky moonlit night. The campers speak in intermingling English and Spanish and I wonder about this unique choice for bilingual interpretation. Young children watching
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with me are enthralled and do not hesitate to interact with the drama unfolding before them. The darkened, cozy space may also provide a brief moment of rest for the fatigued. Next I enter a relaxing patio looking out on to a desert scene. Something is scurrying above me! It takes me a moment to figure out that it is a mechanical rat running across the mock-patio’s awning. Rat is joined by raccoon, skunk, opossum, great horned owl, bobcat, grey fox, and rattlesnake in this border between suburban and wild. Through various interactives, visitors are asked to reflect on who is native and who is an introduced species. Domestic cats are among those implicated in this fragile balance. The patio vignette is the most effective area of Coast to Cactus in conveying the story of habitat degradation and loss because this home setting is so familiar and personal. The Nat hopes that this exhibition will “inspire visitors to start here, learn about the region, and then go out and explore it for themselves.” Coast to Cactus certainly provides many ways for visitors to learn about the region. I was inspired by the little unexpected reminders of the natural beauty in the region and was ready to explore the real thing… either camping in a simple tent or in that very inviting Airstream!
424 BOOK REVIEWS
Baja California Missions: In the Footsteps of the Padres. Text by David Burckhalter. Photographs by David Burckhalter and Mina Sedgwick. Foreword by Bernard L. Fontana. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2013. Photographs, maps, and plans. 166 pp. $24.95 paper.
Reviewed by Vladimir Guerrero, Independent Scholar, Davis, CA.
Assumed to be an island when first discovered in the 1530s, the peninsula was named California after a fictional “island west of the Indies” in a popular Spanish novel of the time. It would be a decade or two before it was known that the Sea of Cortés was a long and narrow gulf and the presumed island an enormous peninsula, but it would be almost two centuries before this fact was generally accepted. After all, because of its length of a thousand kilometers, during the entire colonial period the peninsula would almost exclusively be accessed from the mainland by sea, in a one- to two-week crossing fraught with danger and discomfort. And once there, travelers found the mythical California to be desert- dry, rocky, and mountainous, lacking in pasture, forest, or precious metals, and sparsely populated. For these reasons colonization would not get under way until the end of the seventeenth century, and few settlers wished to accompany the devout churchmen bringing the word of God to the natives. But it was the work of these devout men that is the reason for this book, an introduction to the missions of Baja California based on the eight restored churches of the twenty two established during the Jesuit presence in the province. Through their connections and perseverance, the order obtained private financial support for their apostolate, as well as vice-regal authority to appoint and direct the king’s military personnel, making them for seventy years the de-facto rulers of the land. It was precisely their world-wide success that made them a threat. The Jesuits were too powerful and autonomous for their monarchs and in 1767 were banned by Spain (and earlier by France and Portugal) from all its territories and colonies. The consequences for peninsular California were significant. Spanish colonial officials had to transfer the existing missions to the Franciscan order while at the same time organizing the impending colonization beyond the 30th parallel, to the New California in the north. That it all took place in the space of two short years and was successfully carried out with the limited manpower and resources available is a credit to the administration of New Spain. David Burckhalter and Mina Sedgwick’s Baja California Missions: In the Footsteps of the Padres is a photographic presentation of the surviving eighteenth century
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missions. The main section of the book (120 pages) presents each one of them accompanied by a short text and an architectural plan-view sketch. The text is part travel advice (location, geography, driving directions, local lodging or camping, annual celebrations, etc.) and part a description of the architectural detail and/ or art-work pictured, cross-referenced to the sketch. This enables the reader to visualize complete interior and exterior views of the mission complex with the images in correct relationship to each other. Unfortunately the orientation of the plan sketches is inconsistent (the North is seldom at the top of the page), which makes the visualization more awkward and slower than it should be. For the persevering student, however, the reward is well worth the effort. The introductory section of the book (30 pages) includes a short historical narrative, a list of all 34 missions eventually established in Baja California, and two excellent maps giving their location and current condition. While the presentation is adequate for someone familiar with the historical connection between the two Californias, for the uninitiated it fails to do justice to the excellent photographic record that follows. Perhaps linking this chain of missions to those of Alta California that began with the 1769 Portolá expedition would have made the images come alive with meaning. After all, from Loreto to Santa María (on the 26th and 30th parallels) these missions were the mileposts for the expedition. North of Santa María to the future San Diego and Monterey (on the 32nd and 36th parallels) Portolá was breaking ground and laying the foundation for a New California. The sparseness of its historical context notwithstanding, Baja California Missions: In the Footsteps of the Padres remains true to its objective of being a beautiful visual introduction to the subject. And as a Spanish Jesuit might have phrased it: “one does not ask the elm tree for pears.”
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The Real World of Mission San Luis Rey. By Jim Downs. Oceanside, CA: Liebfrinck, 2015. 200 pp. $19.95 paper.
Reviewed by Ryan Jordan, Lecturer, Department of History, University of San Diego.
Mission San Luis Rey, known as the “King of the Missions,” was by many measures the most successful Spanish-era Franciscan mission in Alta California. But this mission has lacked significant academic attention: the last scholarly book on San Luis Rey was written by Father Zephyrin Engelhardt in 1921. Jim Downs’s The Real World of Mission San Luis Rey is therefore a welcome addition to the literature on California’s mission past. Drawing from many scholarly secondary sources, as well as from published primary sources, Downs’s book will no doubt remain the definitive treatment of Mission San Luis Rey for many years to come. Controlling an area of nearly one million acres that included present-day Oceanside, Escondido, Camp Pendleton, Pala, Palomar Mountain, and Temecula, many contemporaries viewed San Luis Rey as the wealthiest mission in terms of livestock and agricultural output. Early nineteenth-century travel reports also claimed that the natives of San Luis Rey – the Luiseños – lived longer and better than many others in California, especially under the direction of Father Antonio Peyri, whose departure from San Luis Rey in 1832 marked the end of relatively harmonious relations between Europeans and Native Americans in the region. In the mid-nineteenth century, the area once comprising the mission witnessed several traumatic changes associated with the transition from Mexican to American rule, including the Battle of San Pasqual during the US-Mexican War, the Garra Revolt of 1851, and the removal of the Cupenos from Warner’s Ranch in 1903. Several notable figures in the history of California lived on or wrote about the lands formerly part of Mission San Luis Rey, including the Luiseño native Pablo Tac, the last governor of Alta California, Pio Pico, the Mexican-era Luiseño tribal leader Pablo Apis, Native American advocate Helen Hunt Jackson, and twentieth- century film star Leo Carrillo. In his book, Downs ably contextualizes the story of the San Luis Rey mission within the larger history of California. For example, Downs examines several travel accounts of foreigners to San Luis Rey as a reflection on the history of Native American life generally in Alta California before 1848. Elsewhere in his book, Downs describes the area’s involvement in the political squabbles during the terms of Mexican-era governors José María de Echeandía, José Figueroa, Juan Bautista de Alvarado, and Pio Pico. Downs ends his book with an examination of
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the efforts in the twentieth century to preserve and restore Mission San Luis Rey. This portion of the book considers the contributions of priests such as Jeremiah O’Keefe, the noted American journalist Charles Fletcher Lummis, locals including John Steiger and Mel Vernon, and Catholic groups such as the Sisters of the Precious Blood. A central concern for Downs is correcting what he sees as unfair academic criticism directed at Franciscan treatment of the Luiseño Indians at the mission. While acknowledging the damage done to native society by European intrusion, Downs reminds the reader that native life prior to the arrival of the Franciscans was far from idyllic. The author also explains how, apart from the diseases that killed so many California natives, Franciscan treatment of natives was far better than that of the Mexicans or Americans in later periods. Throughout his book, Downs provides a balanced account of the many struggles facing the Luiseño natives by explaining different scholarly opinion regarding the contentious issue of European-Native relations. As a highly accessible overview of the history of Mission San Luis Rey and its relationship with two centuries of regional history, Downs’s book will be appreciated by those with an interest both in the “King of the Missions” as well as in the broader California past.
California Native Plants in the 1830s: The Collections of Thomas Coulter, Thomas Nuttall, and H.M.S. Sulphur with George Barclay and Richard Hinds. By James Lightner. San Diego: San Diego Flora, 2014. Tables, maps, photographs, and notes. 54 pp. $9.95 cloth.
Parry’s California Notebooks, 1849-51 with Letters to John Torrey. By Charles C. Perry. Transcribed, edited, and annotated by James Lightner. San Diego: San Diego Flora, 2014. Maps, drawings, photographs, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. vi + 170 pp. $24.95 cloth.
Reviewed by Theodore A. Strathman, Lecturer, Department of History, California State University San Marcos.
James Lightner, a local writer and authority on San Diego native plants, has produced two books that will be of significant value to those interested in the history of scientific discovery in nineteenth-century California. The common theme that runs through the two works is the effort of botanists to catalogue the flora of California in the years immediately surrounding the American acquisition of the territory. While California Native Plants in the 1830s will most likely appeal especially to those interested in California’s aboriginal flora, Parry’s California
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Notebooks will provide rich rewards to those more generally concerned with the state’s early history. The latter work, the more substantial of the two, consists of Lightner’s transcription of the notebooks of Charles C. Parry, a young botanist who served on the Mexican Boundary Survey as it fixed the international border in the wake of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Lightner has also included in the book letters from Parry to John Torrey, the eminent botanist after whom Parry named the Torrey Pine. These letters, incorporated in chronological fashion among Parry’s notebook entries, contribute significantly to the book by reinforcing and in some cases clarifying Parry’s narrative of his travels and observations. Also included are photographs of herbarium sheets of several plants collected by Parry in California. Lightner’s annotations reflect his expertise and extensive research while offering important discussions of, among other things, plant characteristics and historical figures. Lightner also enhances the notebooks by providing a table of contents that serves as a sketch of Parry’s itinerary during his time in California. This feature is especially important given the absence of a map designating Parry’s travels, the inclusion of which would have made it easier for the reader to keep track of the botanist’s peregrinations. This minor reservation notwithstanding, Parry’s account of his travels makes for interesting reading. One is struck by several themes. First, Parry’s observations suggest the real hazards that accompanied life in frontier California. Especially as acting surgeon during the Boundary Survey’s journey from San Diego to the Colorado River, Parry catalogued the injuries, sicknesses (including several cases of syphilis), and deaths (most notably four drownings when a canoe overturned near the confluence of the Colorado and Gila Rivers) among the party. Second, Parry in several places observed the effects of the Gold Rush, even in then-remote San Diego: some soldiers deserted their posts to travel to the Sierra foothills, prices for food, labor, and livestock had increased, and the government increased salaries, a move designed, according to Parry, “to keep us from running away to the mines” (p. 7). Third, Parry evoked the social and economic transformations that had swept California over the past two decades. His visits to several missions led him to comment on the physical destruction of property that accompanied secularization, and he also observed several signs of the impending decline of the Californios, as when he noted John Forster’s acquisition of the Rancho Santa Margarita y las Flores as payment for a debt owed him by Pio Pico. In remarking on such social developments, Parry was something of a “[Richard Henry] Dana with a microscope and a mule,” as Lightner describes him (p. vi). As Lightner himself notes, though, Parry was hardly an impartial judge, and his discussion of the mission padres contains
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some of the disdain that characterized the observations of Dana. Nevertheless, some of Parry’s observations are of real value; for example, he provided a detailed account of agriculture among the Yuma. California Native Plants in the 1830s describes the visits to San Diego of four naturalists from the United Kingdom and discusses the plant specimens they collected in the region. Like the other book reviewed here, this publication includes high-quality photographs and extensive notes. Lightner has also compiled a list of plants collected by these four men. While this book will be of most use to those interested in the botany and natural history of the region, Lightner has written a brief but well-researched section that provides important context, including a discussion of changes in local flora caused by Spanish and Mexican settlement in the region and a sketch of secularization and its impacts. A similar introductory essay would be a welcome addition to Parry’s California Notebooks, which includes only a brief preface. James Lightner has performed an important service in producing these two works. His knowledge of – and passion for – his topic is evident in the care he has taken to shed light on these relatively little-known figures. For students of California history, Lightner’s books are enlightening accounts of the opening of the territory in the years between Mexican independence and the first years of American rule. The end of Spanish trading restrictions helped bring figures like Coulter and Nuttall to California, while Parry’s sojourns remind us that the gold rush-era emigration included not just prospectors and merchants but others intent on mining the region’s less salable resources.
BOOK NOTES
Before L.A.: Race, Space, and Municipal Power in Los Angeles, 1781–1894. Lamar Series in Western History. By David Samuel Torres-Rouff. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index. xiii + 361 pp. $65.00 cloth. David Torres-Rouf explores the history of Los Angeles from its founding as a Spanish pueblo to the late nineteenth century with a focus on how shifting relations among ethno-racial groups led to spatial arrangements in the city. In the second half of the nineteenth century, previous patterns of cooperation between Anglo Americans and the ethnic Mexican population broke down, and the latter group (along with the local Chinese American population) found itself increasingly relegated to spatially distinct parts of the city that lacked the basic amenities and services that characterized other sections of the metropolis.
430 Book Reviews
Death Valley National Park: A History. By Hal K. Rothman and Char Miller. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2013. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index. xv + 185 pp. $24.95 paper. Before his death in 2007, Hal Rothman had contracted with the University of Nevada Press to publish a history of Death Valley National Park. Char Miller of Pomona College has revised and completed the unfinished manuscript, which was based on a previous history written by Rothman for the National Park Service.
Global West, American Frontier: Travel, Empire, and Exceptionalism from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depression. By David M. Wrobel. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013. xv + 312 pp. $39.95 cloth. This monograph examines travel writing from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1930s and how both American and foreign visitors to the West understood the region. Wrobel also considers American writers’ encounters with frontier regions outside the United States. One of book’s central themes is how travelers reflected upon ideas of American exceptionalism; some reflected this vein of thinking while others challenged it.
Latinos at the Golden Gate: Creating Community and Identity in San Francisco. By Tomás F. Summers Sandoval, Jr. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Illustrations, maps, table, notes, bibliography, and index. xv + 237 pp. $39.95 cloth. Tomás Summers Sandoval’s book charts the development of San Francisco’s Latino population from the era of the Gold Rush to the late 1960s. The author pays special attention to Latinos’ efforts to forge community through political activism, from church-based efforts to promote unity among Spanish-speakers to student protest at San Francisco State.
Mercury and the Making of California: Mining, Landscape, and Race, 1840–1890. Mining the American West Series. By Andrew Scott Johnston. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2013. Illustrations, maps, charts, tables, notes, bibliography, and index. xi + 284 pp. $45.00 cloth. This book explores the impact of the mercury- mining industry on California. Mercury extraction was a necessary component of successful gold and silver mining in California and the West, and Johnston examines how the industry created a unique built environment as well as divisions among the various ethnic groups who constituted the workforce.
431 The Journal of San Diego History
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In 1915 San Diego hosted an exposition that put the city on the map
Crowds crossed the Cabrillo Bridge to see San Diego's "Fantasy City" in Balboa Park
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EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Dan Eaton Steve Francis Charlotte Cagan Gayle Hom Tom Karlo Lucy C. Jackson Bob Kelly BOARD OF TRUSTEES John Morrell Helen Kinnaird Thompson Fetter, President Ann Navarra Yvonne W. Larsen William Lawrence, Vice President Susan B. Peinado David Malcolm Robert J. Watkins, Vice President Sandra Perlatti Seth W. Mallios, Ph.D. Frank Alessi, Treasurer Kay Porter Jack Monger Ann Hill, Secretary Margie Warner Jimmy Parker Robert F. Adelizzi, President Emeritus Allan Wasserman Rana Sampson Hal Sadler FAIA, President Emeritus Roger Zucchet Hon. Lynn Schenk TRUSTEES Drew Schlosberg ADVISORY BOARD Richard Bregante Mary L. Walshok, Ph.D. Malin Burnham Diane Canedo Stephen B. Williams Thomas A. Caughlan, USMC, Ret. Ray Carpenter Hon. Pete Wilson Iris Engstrand, Ph.D. Joe Craver Karin E. Winner Kim Fletcher Debra Cushman-Parrish
The San Diego History Center gratefully acknowledges the generous support of individuals contributing above $1,000 since April 1, 2014. Mr. and Mrs. Robert Adelizzi Mrs. Jacqueline M. Gillman Mr. and Mrs. Robert Price Mr. and Mrs. Frank Alessi Ms. Connie K. Golden Mrs. Susan Randerson Mr. and Mrs. Dominic Alessio Mr. and Mrs. John D. Hill Mr. W. Donald Redfern Mr. and Mrs. Richard Amtower Ms. Gayle Hom Mr. and Mrs. M. Lea Rudee Mr. and Mrs. C. Neil Ash Dr. Carl Hoppe and Mr. and Mrs. Hal Sadler Mrs. Mary Berend Diane Fletcher-Hoppe Honorable Lynn Schenk Mr. and Mrs. Richard Bregante Mr. and Mrs. Thomas R. Jackson Ms. Anne Schwartz Mr. and Mrs. Ed J. Brown Jr. Mrs. Ann Jones Mrs. Janet Sutter Mr. and Mrs. Malin Burnham Dr. and Mrs. J. Michael Kelly Ms. Deborah Szekely Mr. and Mrs. David Canedo Mr. Michael and Mr. and Mrs. John Thornton Mr. Ray Carpenter Mrs. Marilyn Kelley Mr. Albert Eugene Trepte Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Clay Mr. and Mrs. Webster Kinnaird Ms. Anne S. Vafis Mr. and Mrs. Boyd D. Collier Ms. Janet Klauber Mr. Mark Trotter Mrs. Jane Cowgill Mr. and Mrs. William Lawrence Mr. Jonathan Vick and Lael Mr. and Mrs. Bram Dijkstra Ms. Patricia L. Mahoney Montgomery, PhD The Dyson Estate Mr. and Mrs. Edward C. Malone Dr. Robert D. Wallace Mr. Dan Eaton Mr. and Mrs. James Milch Dr. Mary L. Walshok Mr. and Mrs. Jim Elliott The Alice Miller Family Mrs. Nell Waltz Dr. Iris Engstrand Mr. A. Fenner Milton Mr. John and Mrs. Margie Warner Mrs. Anne L. Evans Mr. and Mrs. John Morrell Mr. and Mrs. Bob Watkins Mr. and Mrs. Donald R. Faye Ms. Ann Navarra Mr. and Mrs. Allan Wasserman Mr. and Mrs. Thompson Fetter Mr. William Newbern Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Williams Mr. Nicholas M. Fintzelberg Ms. Nora Hom Newbern The Honorable Pete Wilson and Mrs. Ms. Joan R. Fisher Ms. Patricia O’Connor Gayle Wilson Mr. and Mrs. Kim Fletcher Mr. Patrick O’Connor Ms. Virginia Wofford and Ms. Mary E. Fletcher Harker Mrs. Madeleine Pavel Mr. Bill Christian Ms. Laura Galinson Ms. Susan Peinado Mr. and Mrs. Roger Zucchet Mr. and Mrs. George Gildred Ms. Sandra Perlatti Mr. and Mrs. Philip Gildred Mrs. Kay Porter
The San Diego History Center gratefully acknowledges the generous support of businesses and foundations contributing above $1,000 since April 1, 2014. A. O. Reed and Co. Frazee Enterprises Rita’s San Diego Charitable Foundation Academy of Our Lady of Peace Frost Hardwood Lumber Co. Robert M. Golden Foundation Allison and Robert Price Foundation Hom Family Fund Rotary Club of San Diego Anonymous Advised Fund J. W. Sefton Foundation Samuel I. and John Henry Fox Auto Club Enterprises Jane Tevor Fetter and Thompson Fetter Foundation Barney and Barney Fund San Diego Center for Children California Marine Cleaning, Inc. Jerome’s Furniture San Diego Gas & Electric Claude and Dianna Hudnall Fund Kinder Morgan Foundation The Arthur and Jeanette Pratt Congregation Beth Israel Lyon Technologies, Inc. Memorial Fund County of San Diego Milton Fund The Charles and Randi Wax Fund Cubic Corporation Mission Federal Credit Union The Chase Group Cushman Foundation Mission San Diego de Alcala The Corky McMillin Companies Cymer, Inc. NTC Foundation The Legler Benbough Foundation David C. Copley Foundation Patrons of the Prado The Robert David Lion Gardiner David Whitmire Hearst Jr. Foundation Paul Bechtner Foundation Foundation, Inc. De Falco Family Foundation, Inc. Point Loma Nazarene University The Ruth Lane Charitable Foundation Dr. Seuss Foundation Price Philanthropies Foundation U.S. Bank Dr. Seuss Fund Quest For Truth Foundation Union Bank of California Fidelity National Title Company ResMed Corp. University of California, San Diego
436 The San Diego History Center gratefully acknowledges the generosity of the Robert D.L. Gardiner Foundation and the Quest for Truth Foundation for their ongoing support of The Journal of San Diego History
Contributions to support The Journal may also be made to The Journal of San Diego History Fund at
The San Diego Foundation (619) 235-2300 or (858) 385-1595 [email protected]
www.sandiegohistory.org
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